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.

Comments

And whose fault is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:And whose fault is that?

[UsuallyReasonable]

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.

There needs to be an DMCA review with fines payed

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Re:Bitter

[admiralh]

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.

Sue who?

[Solandri]

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).

Re:There needs to be an DMCA review with fines pay

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:sue for fraud 800K + legal fees seems about rig

[HornWumpus]

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.