Amazon sues alleged scammers who stole millions by bribing and hacking their way to refunds for products they never returned

A company known as REKK marketed its refund providers on social media websites, together with Reddit and Discord, and communicated with perpetrators on the messaging app Telegram, Amazon mentioned in a lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Courtroom within the state of Washington. The lawsuit names REKK and almost 30 individuals from the US, Canada, UK, Greece, Lithuania and the Netherlands as defendants within the scheme, which concerned hacking into Amazon’s inside methods and bribing Amazon workers to approve reimbursements. REKK charged clients, who wished to get dear objects like MacBook Professional laptops and automotive tires with out paying for them, a fee based mostly on the worth of the acquisition. 

“The defendants’ scheme methods Amazon into processing refunds for merchandise which are by no means returned; as a substitute of returning the merchandise as promised, defendants maintain the product and the refund,” Amazon mentioned in its lawsuit.

The lawsuit lists greater than a dozen transactions from June 2022 to Could 2023 as resulting in fraudulent refunds. Gadgets bought embody gaming consoles, smartphones, laptops and even a pure gold coin. The corporate identifies not less than seven former Amazon workers that participated within the theft as “insiders” by allegedly taking bribes of 1000’s of {dollars} to approve refunds regardless that merchandise weren’t returned.

Buyers world wide will spend $678 billion on Amazon websites this yr, making it an enormous goal for scams that typically result in felony indictments and contain Amazon insiders. In 2020, an Amazon worker in India was charged with taking $100,000 in bribes to offer choose retailers benefits over others promoting items on the location. 

Amazon mentioned it spent $1.2 billion and employed 15,000 individuals in 2022 to struggle theft, fraud and abuse on its website.

“When fraud is detected, as on this case, Amazon takes a wide range of measures to cease the exercise, together with issuing warnings, closing accounts, and stopping people who engaged in refund fraud from opening new accounts,” Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vp in command of vendor providers, mentioned in a LinkedIn post.