Amazon has released its third annual Brand Protection Report, highlighting how the company’s efforts to protect customers, brands, and selling partners from counterfeit products has resulted in more criminal referrals and industry partnerships than ever before. The report also demonstrates how the strategic combination of industry-leading technology and experts are successfully stopping bad actors and making an impact beyond Amazon’s store—identifying, seizing, and appropriately disposing of over six million counterfeit products in 2022, preventing them from reaching customers and being resold elsewhere in the global supply chain.
“We take pride in the progress our organization has made this past year, specifically further evolving our technology to stay ahead of bad actors and doubling down on our criminal referral and litigation efforts,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s Vice President of Worldwide Selling Partner Services. “We’re appreciative of the growing industry-wide collaboration in this space, and look forward to continuing to innovate and work together to drive counterfeits to zero.”
Amazon’s Brand Protection Report highlights progress in four key areas: 1) robust proactive controls to protect its store, 2) powerful tools to protect brands, 3) holding bad actors accountable, and 4) protecting and educating customers:
Increasingly Deterring Bad Actors: Our robust seller verification, including connecting one-on-one with prospective sellers through video chat, coupled with continued advancements in our machine learning-based detection, are deterring bad actors from even attempting to create new Amazon selling accounts. In 2022, we stopped over 800,000 attempts to create new selling accounts, preventing bad actors from publishing a single product for sale—down from 2.5 million attempts in 2021, and 6 million attempts in 2020.
Expanded Adoption of Brand Protection Tools: We continued improving our automated protection technologies which leverage our partnership with brands enrolled in Brand Registry and the data they provide us, reducing the need for brands to find and report infringements. In 2022, adoption of our brand protection programs continued to grow—and at the same time, the absolute number of valid notices of infringement filed by brands in Brand Registry decreased by over 35%.
Holding Counterfeiters Accountable and Stopping Them From Abusing Our Store and Others: Our efforts to identify and dismantle counterfeit organizations are working and making a positive impact. In 2022, Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit sued or referred for investigation over 1,300 criminals in the U.S., UK, EU, and China. We continued to partner with brands and law enforcement to not only stop these bad actors, but we also worked to go upstream from the counterfeit signals we detected to identify, seize, and appropriately dispose of over six million counterfeit products. This prevented them from being resold anywhere in the supply chain.
Strengthening Consumer Education: In partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, we built marketing campaigns that helped educated consumers about how to shop safely and ensure they were purchasing authentic products, while also ensuring they understood the harm and dangers of purchasing counterfeits. These campaigns reached over 70 million consumers in the U.S.