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Amazon Was Tricked By a Fake Law Firm Into Removing a Popular Product, Costing the Seller $200,000 (cnbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the tricked-ya dept.

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.

10 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. And whose fault is that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:And whose fault is that? by UsuallyReasonable · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not quite sure how stupid you are from your post, so let me pitch this pretty low. If this is one of the busiest times of the year, and the guy didn't make his sales, then he lost a significant percentage of his expected annual revenue and profit, even if you don't happen to be impressed by the numbers. Maybe for you being out $10,000 is something you just worry about after you get done with your manicure, but maybe for this guy it's 25% of what he expected to make in 2017. You might consider commenting on things where you actually know what's going on, instead of ones where you obviously don't.

  2. There needs to be an DMCA review with fines payed by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. sue for fraud 800K + legal fees seems about right. by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    sue for fraud 800K + legal fees seems about right.

  4. Why didn't Amazon vette the source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why didn't Amazon vette the source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Only hundreds? I work for an online retail company with about 160 employees, and we received around fourteen thousand legal notices last year. Most were fake DMCA violations claiming they owned the pictures we took of our products. Some were fake patent claims. A few were patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures. They targeted us since we're in the same building in Eastgate Bellevue, WA, and we called the police on them a couple of times when their drunk employees were vomiting on the sidewalk multiple times. Also, a bunch of false trademark claims.

      My wife works at Amazon, and she says they have 360,000 employees. Assuming the number of fake claims scales linearly with the number of employees, that means they should get about 31.5 million legal notices a year. They might even get more than that since they're a much richer target.

  5. Amazon should pay them a settlement by gurps_npc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  6. I'd be surprised if takes until Monday by sandbagger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >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.
  7. Re:sue for fraud 800K + legal fees seems about rig by HornWumpus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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'
  8. Re:Bitter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.