Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Was Tricked By a Fake Law Firm Into Removing a Popular Product, Costing the Seller $200,000 (cnbc.com)
Eugene Kim, reporting for CNBC: Shortly before Amazon Prime Day in July, the owner of the Brushes4Less store on Amazon's marketplace received a suspension notice for his best-selling product, a toothbrush head replacement. The email that landed in his inbox said the product was being delisted from the site because of an intellectual property violation. In order to resolve the matter and get the product reinstated, the owner would have to contact the law firm that filed the complaint. But there was one problem: the firm didn't exist. Brushes4Less was given the contact information for an entity named Wesley & McCain in Pittsburgh. The website wesleymccain.com has profiles for five lawyers. A Google image search shows that all five actually work for the law firm Brydon, Swearengen & England in Jefferson City, Missouri. The phone number for Wesley & McCain doesn't work while the address belongs to a firm in Pittsburgh called Robb Leonard Mulvihill. The person who supposedly filed the complaint is not registered to practice law in Pennsylvania. One section on Wesley & McCain's site stole language from the website of the Colby Law Office. The owner of Brushes4Less agreed to tell his story to CNBC but asked that we not use his name out of concern for his privacy. As far as he can tell, and based on what CNBC could confirm, Amazon was duped into shutting down the seller's key product days before the site's busiest shopping event ever.
Five bucks says Amazon won't compensate the seller for the loss of revenue. But you better believe that if one of Amazon's suppliers did this to Amazon, there'd be lawsuits galore.
There needs to be an ip / DMCA / trade marks / etc review with fines payed out for BS link this or just can only be taken down by court order.
Who?
and you're going to pay for this additional work, RIGHT?
sue for fraud 800K + legal fees seems about right.
I want to know why Amazon just passed this along without vetting the law firm out? Doesn't anyone do something as simple as making a phone call, checking if the law firm is even licensed? All this is easy enough to obtain. Especially when your being ask to revoke a customers product.
amazon will pay or do hard time this may be at least in part an criminal case.
Who's going to pay the fine? No one knows who filed this claim - all the identities cited are faked or stolen.
As long as email exists, frauds like this will happen. In fact, faking court orders to get Google to take down search results and delist sites is another notable use of fake identities and communications sent through email.
I guess what we really need is a non-anonymous internet with verifiable identities at all stages, so legal business can be safely conducted.
1) The person who created the fake web site/law firm/etc. and perpetrated the fraud.
2) Amazon, since they did not do due diligence and ensure that the complaint was legit. And if there original fraudster (see 1) cannot be found, that even makes Amazon's due diligence look even worse.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Exactly who would be paying the fine in this case? The law firm that doesn't exist?
inventory was in Amazon's fulfillment center what if they got an court order to get it back (with amazon still not letting it out or saying that you must buy it and it is not in store at this time) and they just showed up at the fulfillment center with the county sheriff how would of that played out??
Who's going to pay the fine? No one knows who filed this claim - all the identities cited are faked or stolen.
As long as email exists, frauds like this will happen. In fact, faking court orders to get Google to take down search results and delist sites is another notable use of fake identities and communications sent through email.
I guess what we really need is a non-anonymous internet with verifiable identities at all stages, so legal business can be safely conducted.
So lawyer (or other professional credentials) verification could be a use for blockchain.
amazon will pay or do hard time this may be at least in part an criminal case.
Amazon might be liable in a civil court, but not a criminal court. Even money someone at Amazon pulled up the website, saw what looked like a law firm , then approved the request. It might be negligent, but not criminal. Certainly not enough for criminal charges unless they can prove Amazon knew it was a false request. That would be like someone taking a taxi to a bank and then robbing it, so the police arrest the cab driver for conspiracy to commit robbery.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Turn the case over to the (state) licensing authority with jurisdiction. Practicing law without a license. Possible criminal penalties.
Have gnu, will travel.
Amazon did not do reasonable due diligence and was the party tricked by the fraud, they should be the one to pay a penalty.
This on top of fraud complaints made against whoever did the fraud in the first part.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Being negligent doesn't rule out criminality.
Otherwise Criminal Negligence laws wouldn't exist.
Somebody probably posted a bad review that got redacted by Brushes4Less and the reviewer got revenge.
You're confusing me with someone else.
- __aaclcg7560
Somewhere somebody gained from the seller not having their product available. Either a direct monetary gain or some personal satisfaction gain.
Also should there be some money trail or access logs for the creation of this fake web site?
Copy"right" and "intellectual property" are inherently a violation of our civil rights, elitist, and a means to censor, control, and privilege a few. Copy"right" and "intellectual property" are a threat to our democracies. They provide the tools for both those in power and the elite to undermine our communications. This is just one commercial example of how this happens- but it's even more egregious that censorship of political speech is routine. My fellow activists have been routinely censored on YouTube for instance, Facebook, and similar. For little more than violating someone's sensibilities or a result of self-entitled individuals who believe they have a right to control your speech. Censorship and copy"right" and "intellectual property" needs to die. No one has been robbed or otherwise deprived of anything when a copy is made. The original remains with the owner of said physical property (ie the medium on which content exists). To suggest otherwise means the entertainment industry produces more than the entire US's economy. That's absurd.
hard time? really. that's clue number one you don't have a clue what you are talking about. Amazon, might, pay some fine, but doubtful. Amazon messed up, but didn't commit any crime. The criminal in this case is the seller's competition who committed the fraud. Follow the money, who gained to benefit from this? This person's competition and nobody else.
Cocksuckers!
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
It looks like the person(s) who filed the complaint created a fake law firm site using info stolen from a real law firm's site. It wasn't good enough to pass a 5 minute sniff test, but apparently was good enough to pass Amazon's 1-click non-test. Likely the person(s) filed the fake complaint (and set up the fake website) using an anonymous email account.
The onus in these cases has to be on Amazon to expend the resources to properly vet these claims before acting on them. If there were viable competition between marketplaces, this wouldn't be a problem. Sellers would abandon the flaky/lazy marketplace and move to ones which treated them better. But Amazon dominates online sales, much like eBay dominates online auctions.
This is the whole reason we revolted against walled garden online services (AOL, Prodigy, GEnie, MSN) in the 1990s in favor of the open Internet. Having a handful of companies acting as gatekeepers just presents too much opportunity for abuse. When Amazon first started, I was hoping multiple online retailers like it would blossom and we'd rely on price search engines (like Pricegrabber) to invite competition between all online retailers. Unfortunately that hasn't really happened, and if anything the public seems to be gravitating back towards the walled gardens (iOS iTunes, Google Play on Android).
Not for shit like this. This is just a matter of money. Criminal negligence typically involves someone so negligent that somebody gets killed or severely injured.
>Anonymous Coward
>I guess what we really need is a non-anonymous internet
gud1
FC Closer
You mean something like digitally signed email?
You really think they don't have a "we can stop selling your product for any reason we want whenever we want without notice" clause in whatever their contract with market place sellers is?
Not only that, this is probably one of the only cases where the DMCA's perjury clause actually applies: the party who sent the notice claimed to legally represent someone they don't actually represent, which is the only part of the DMCA takedown notice that must be made under penalty of perjury.
Since there are definitely criminal penalties for perjury under the DMCA, the seller may be able to convince the FBI to open an investigation and subpoena Amazon for any logs containing possible identifying info of the fraudsters. Of course, there's a low chance they'll actually get anything useful unless the fraudsters were immensely stupid...
amazon may face accessory criminal penalties as well.
>No one knows who filed this claim - all the identities cited are faked or stolen.
No-one knows yet. The identities are fraudulent but the motives are not. Someone did this to hurt them, not just play rough and tumble capitalism. I'd start by asking the owners a few questions:
1) Do you have any particularly disgruntled ex-employees?
2) Is there a competitor who has been particularly aggressive?
3) Did anyone on the executive get divorced recently?
This probably was not done by someone on the other side of the Earth who never heard of the product. It was done by someone who knew them and wanted them hit when they were vulnerable. That's going to be a very short list.
I'd imagine that Amazon's fraud department has a bunch of interns data mining to see if they can't help narrow that list even further because right now they need to demonstrate good will. You can also bet that the defamed law firm will not be letting this slide.
Of course, proving this in court may be another matter but it may never need to get to that. The suspect may go bankrupt in pretrial.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Instead of a fine, which is difficult to collect in the case of a fictitious entity, what about requiring a bond?
We already see bonds being used in legal disputes over intellectual property. For instance, if Apple sues Samsung and asks the court for an injunction against the sale of Samsung products, Apple will be forced to put up a bond. If it later turns out that Samsung was in the right all along, that bond will be used to compensate Samsung for the sales lost during the injunction.
Given that a DMCA takedown acts as an injunction, why not require that anyone filing a DMCA takedown request provide proof that they are bonded? If it later turns out that they perjured themselves, filed a false claim, or otherwise abused the system, the victim of the takedown notice won't have to hunt down the abuser to receive compensation. Instead, they can simply go to the surety company to collect their compensation, just like you would with a bonded contractor.
This also has the benefit of slowing down or at least discouraging any given company's ability to abuse the system. After all, if they maintain the minimum bond allowed and it was just paid out to a victim, they won't be able to use it to secure a future takedown notice until they pay it back, effectively preventing them from filing any more takedown notices. And if they keep a bond for more than the minimum, they'll potentially be out quite a bit of money if they start abusing the system.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get around the biggest problem with this idea: if the minimum bond is too large, say, $100K, normal people wouldn't be able to protect their work since they couldn't afford the minimum bond, while if the minimum bond was too small, say, $10, it wouldn't be useful in the least in compensating victims for their loss. Maybe there's a way around it, but I haven't figured out a way to make it both fair to big companies and Joe Schmoes while still discouraging abusers in the few minutes it took to type this comment.
How would have that played out? Or how would've that played out. English motherfucker, do you speak it?
English, motherfucker, do you speak it?
Wouldn't it be nice to set up a society and government with laws and a constitution where actions are not taken until there has been a court hearing? Oh wait...
Yes, I know, there need to be emergency actions / injunctions, but this doesn't sound like it would have qualified (by my rules) for an emergency order.
I hope they sue and win big, sue for treble damages, sue for punitive, etc.
You've obviously never tried to get any cop to help you with any property crime.
They will give you a police report, for your insurance. That's all. You can have 'them' on video, the cops won't care. With the narrow exceptions of perps that have already pissed the cops off or perps who are cops (the second is 'danger Will Robinson' for you). If the video is good enough perhaps the local news will use it to get some ratings. You're on your own.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sue John Doe and the firm that hired him. Also make police reports to various agencies.
They used a Godaddy account and Microsoft hosting. You think there isn't a money trail or a log of connections to the host? Some two-bit fraudster thought this was a good idea. You've got a pretty good chance that they made mistakes.
Real lawyers write in C++
Brushes4Less looses out big time, so who wins ? Did some other toothbrush manufacturer sell more stuff as a result ? Following the money might be a good way of finding who ultimately was responsible — assuming that it was not just some random act of vandalism.
Amazon is best placed to see where sales went, it will be interesting to see if they can be bothered.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The original brush heads for sonicare is outrageously expensive. As bad as the ink jet printer replacement price gouging.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...which I specifically mentioned as a problem that I didn't know how to get around.
In order to sue Amazon for anything worthwhile, you'd have to be able to persuade a court that your losses were significant. To do that, you'd have to build up a reasonable business base to begin with.
At that point, "torpedoing your own business" becomes a significantly less attractive proposition.
Of course, if you've done your sums and figured out that your business is actually making a loss... this might be a way out. But it's a hard slog to get to that point, and even harder to realize and admit it to yourself when you do.
Perhaps it was a former customer who purchased products from Brushes4Less, received poor quality products, and had a bad experience with Brushes4Less's customer service? Good luck following the money on Amazon, especially considering the timeframe in which it occurred.
Undoubtably someone else gained. It's like those third party allopeninghours.com websites that spring up when you use google maps. They are full of useful advice like the opening hours of store, bar, restaurant or pharmacist. Except for one thing, the hours that they present are not accurate - they ignore late night opening hours. Sometimes they say the shop is open 24-hours all week when it's 9 to 5 business. That ends up with business going elsewhere.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Yeah because this could never ever have been commited by snail mail or telephone...
It's an easy problem to get around. Accept both submissions - with and without bond. If a bond is put up, act on the request immediately. If no bond is put up, verify the request before acting on it. Large companies can easily put up the bond and get immediate action. Small companies may not be able to put up a bond, but at least still have a way to submit a takedown request, it just may take longer for the takedown to occur.
And thus the end of the human race came not with a roar, nor applause, nor whining, nor crying, nor even silence, but with the air heavy with apathy.
That could work. Right now, service providers like YouTube have to "expeditiously" remove infringing content if they want to maintain their safe harbor status that keeps them from being held liable for that content. But if we removed that requirement for takedowns that aren't bonded, it'd give hosts a means to vet the claims that are more likely to be abusive, while also incentivizing the big players to play nice.
You've obviously never tried to get any cop to help you with any property crime.
With the narrow exceptions of perps that have already pissed the cops off or perps who are cops (the second is 'danger Will Robinson' for you).
So have you had experience with dirty cops? Or are you just repeating shit you saw on some TV program?
This would work in a world where the laws were being made to actually protect folks instead of better the interest of those paying for the laws.
But we don't live there.
Doesn't need to be a signature in the email. Just some trusted entity where you can upload and sign documents. In Sweden, the banks provide a signing service for your national identity number. The government provides mappings of numbers to names and companies you are allowed to sign legal documents for.
Re: what we need is an unanonymous internet.
Stupidest comment of 2017 so far.
Amazon should settle. Bone heads
someone selling brushes probably - chinese who invested in something like that probably.
Grew up driving cars that said 'I can't afford a lawyer'.
The name was 'Officer Martinez'...he was one rancid corrupt violent bully cop. If I knew where he was buried, I'd piss^h^h^h^hcrap on his grave.
I moved because he 'knew my face'.
My station in life has changed, cops act entirely different around me now, but I know how they are. Just the 'toughest gang in town'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
if you sell more than 30k worth of goods you will be de-listed and one of their own online stores will pop up selling your products. In the past years we would import a container of goods never seen by the USA. were talking products less than $7 and sell for $70. We would sell them at swapmeets and liquor stores for most amount of money. Then sell on amazon for returns, complaints, de-listed, etc. Standard returns are 2 out of 10 items sold if not more depending on how user friendly the product is, unless you pay for your item returned, Amazon takes the returns places them into cardboard gaylords 4 feet by 4 feet by 6 feet tall. they fill the boxes to the top. then sell your returns to people that pay the most for the returns. I purchased a truck load of these returns , products were all trash they promise particular items in the returns, buts its like digging in a trash dump. We dumped these bins out at the swap-meet netted a dollar per item, not even worth picking the trash up.. i just left it. I take out a few items with warranty and call the manufacture tell them i need to have the items repaired they ask for the serial number and say sorry this item was returned to amazon and the warranty is null and void. oh the best part is the way they screw with you about your money, the way they make you wait to see how much your making 10 days later, then malformed data daily so you really have no idea how much your making. How about the fact they use your money to make interest on your money while you sit there for 10 days wondering if you have any money.... also they adjust your price of your product to maximize their margins. its a pay to play last time i checked overhead cost of amazon was 32% + just remember selling from your trunk is the best sales, and your not waiting for amazon!
The bond could clearly scale.
Duration of Product Ban * Expected Profit Per Day/Sale
But that still has issues with small infringed party versus large infringing party.
Let's be honest, the best route is rapid investigation and arbitration. Or new laws that protect the aggrieved party whichever side they are on.
Hmm, the "put a bond up, we'll apply the ban prior to investigation, otherwise we'll investigate then decide whether to ban" might work.
Quote fail. You're dumb. And you missed "an court".