Amazon Was Victimized By a Pervasive Fraud with Hackers Stealing Merchant Funds

The world’s biggest online retail platform, and ecommerce giant, Amazon Inc. was victimized of an extensive fraud from May to October of 2018, according to a U.K legal document.

Amazon lawyer said it already had done an investigation about the incident and asked a London judge to approve searches of account statements in which hackers funneled the funds into. Hackers were able to break in to more than 100 seller accounts and siphoned cash from sales and loans directly to their own bank accounts, which was reported to be wtih Barclays Plc and Prepaid Technologies Ltd.

Amazon legal counsel said that hackers may have used phishing techniques to obtain sellers log in credentials, thus giving them pledge access to their accounts and then changed their bank account information to their own. And their investigation confirms that the first instance of hacking activity was on May 16, 2018.

Though it is unclear on how much the hackers stole, Amazon said that it issued more than $1 billion dollars in loans to merchant in 2018, that makes the incident more concerning since the amount of money involve might be millions. Amazon Inc. said that it will continue to enhance and develop its online system to make sure these incidents will not happen again, and also sends message to the affected seller, as well as to those who are not, to be very vigilant about phishing techniques.

On the court filing, Amazon lawyers said that they need the documents “to investigate the fraud, identify and pursue the wrongdoers, locate the whereabouts of misappropriated funds, bring the fraud to an end and deter future wrongdoing,”.

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Barclay Plc particularly said that they have strict guidelines and a very sophisticated fraud system and will make sure the incident will be dealt with accordingly. Both Barclay Plc and Prepaid Technologies were known to be party associated with Mactercard Inc. 

Amazon upholds its promise to their customer about protection and security of their information, following with another technical issue of their websites that occurred before Black Friday last year, this was when the issue inadvertently posted customer names and email addresses to its website. This incident has been taken care of swiftly, Amazon sends out an email notification to their affected customers regarding the technical issue, the customers were told on the email about:

“Our website inadvertently disclosed your email address or name and email address due to a technical error. The issue has been fixed. This is not a result of anything you have done, and there is no need for you to change your password or take any other action. The impacted customers have been contacted. Amazon takes all security-related matters very seriously and your account security is our top priority. We have policies and security measures in place to ensure that your personal information remains secure.”

– Amazon sends out email to their affected customers.

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