Why Amazon is sending thousands of letters in the mail to sellers, who have an obligation to respond

The giant Amazon offers many facilities for anyone can sell in your store. This benefits all parties: customers have more to choose from, local shops and freelancers can sell online, and Amazon makes more than half of its profits from these third-party sellers.

It seems like a round business, and it is. But it entails a series of difficulties. And it is that among those millions of honest sellers, scammers also sneak in. As Amazon itself explains in the press release published by Business Insider, “we leverage a combination of advanced machine learning capabilities, robust research, and expert human investigators to protect our customers and seller partners from bad actors and bad products“.

Despite the security and tracking measures carried out by Amazon, among the millions of sellers and products, it is inevitable that some scams slip throughlike the the ghost sellers that we ourselves have been able to verify, and that we explain in this report:

The scam of the Amazon ghost seller that sells at half price: this is how it works

Scammers always appear where there is business, and money moves. A recurring scam on Amazon, which is still active, has come to our attention. So you can detect it and avoid it.

Read the report

Most sellers who have intent to scam use fake addresses. Either they do not exist, or they are real addresses but from people who have nothing to do with them, who have randomly taken from databases of hacked Facebook, Google, etc. accounts. Or they have hacked into a legal seller account and use it on your behalf.

To verify the addresses of sellers, Amazon has begun to use a tactic that is as classic as it is effective in the United States: send a paper letter to the physical address on your account.

This letter contains a verification code, and if the seller does not enter that code into your account within 60 days, it will be locked and investigated for a possible false or non-existent address.

There is no record that they are using this system in Europe, but it cannot be ruled out that they do so at any time.

According to Business Insider, in Europe Amazon requires showing the real address of the store in the seller’s file, something that did not happen in the United States.

It is not easy to keep a network of businesses as vast as Amazon secure. From a buyer’s point of view, Amazon’s top recommendation is do not make deals or payments outside your platform. If a seller asks to contact an email outside of Amazon, or make a payment through an email instead of Amazon itself, it must be rejected.

We will only be covered by Amazon warranties if all dealings with third-party sellers are carried out within the channels of the platform.