One of the unfortunate realities of selling on Amazon as of late 2016/early 2017, at least, is that fraudulent sellers have become widespread. These sellers are listing tens of thousands of offers with unreasonably low prices in hopes that buyers who have the misfortune of ordering from them will not bother to go through the process of reporting the seller for fraud before their deposit from Amazon clears.

Searching on the Amazon seller forums will reveal many threads of people talking about “Just launched seller scam” and similar. Recently, these sellers have started to hijack existing dormant seller accounts with positive feedback from years ago making it harder for customers to identify scammers without going through extra steps at checkout to verify the recency of feedback.

Here’s some feedback from buyers tricked by such scams:

Stay away from this seller! Fraudulent! Sent a China tracking number but never sent item and absolutely will not respond!
or:
I am utterly disgusted with my experience with this seller. What they have done is outright fraud. They are taking people’s money and “shipping” packages to addresses in other states.
or:
THIS SELLER IS A FAKE!!! DO NOT BUY!!! CHARGED MY CREDIT CARD WEEKS AGO AND SENT A FAKE TRACKING NUMBER.
There are numerous problems with competitors such as this, some of which are not obvious.
  1. Legitimate sellers may have their listings deactivated due to Amazon-detected “pricing errors” if too many fraudulent sellers with low prices attack a particular listing.
  2. Reimbursements for FBA lost inventory are based on historical sales prices, which may be distorted by fraudulent sellers.
  3. Repricing tools were written under the assumption that competitors are legitimate and have relatively similar margins, if you are not careful when using them fraudulent sellers can cause a re-pricer to you sell items at well below cost.
  4. If you’re spending money on Amazon Sponsored Advertisements, you may be wasting your funds driving sales to the fraudulent sellers.
  5. Fraudulent sellers erode consumer confidence in the Amazon marketplace in general, negatively affecting all legitimate sellers.
The process of reporting fraudulent sellers is relatively simple, as outlined in this post from the Amazon Seller forums which has been copied/pasted frequently (one source):

Make a very simple list of all sellers, you are reporting:

1. Seller’s name:

Link to their storefront:

2. Seller’s name:

Link to their storefront:

3. Seller’s name:

Link to their storefront:

etc…

Message: We believe above sellers are engaging in fraudulent activity. Please investigate.

Subject of email: Possible fraudulent sellers.

Email the list, directly to:seller-performance@amazon.com

Do not use the terms, “fake” or “counterfeit”.

Do not add anything to the above message.

Do not repeat names of sellers that you previously reported.
(In other words, if you are sending daily or weekly reports, do not add the same seller’s name to another list.)

Amazon is well aware of the problem, but you do need to report them, as I posted above.

The main reason for brevity, is to make sure your report is read and understood. Seller performance likely receives thousands of emails a day and anything to make it easier for them, will make it more efficient for you.

The problem is, how do you quickly and easily find these folks if you have hundreds or thousands of listings yourself? We’ve created a tool/process to do so. The tool collects information from the MWS API for AnyOfferChanged events, much like a repricer would. This information is gathered in an Amazon SQS queue and checked for. We maintain a white list of legitimate competitors, Amazon Warehouse Deals and our own merchant IDs. For merchant IDs not on the white list, we collect a batch per day and send them to an employee. The employee follows links similar to https://www.amazon.com/sp?marketplaceID=…&orderID=&seller=... that make it easy to get the details required for submitting the standard email to Seller Performance. The employee submits daily reports to Amazon and investigates to find any merchant IDs that should be added to the watch list. They also track the dates the reported fraudulent sellers to Amazon.
By operating in this way, the reporting to Amazon of fraudulent sellers can be relatively easily delegated/outsourced as it does not require access to your seller account to do so.
Automated Tools for Fighting Amazon Fraud