Amazon Recasts Marketplace Fraud as a Broader Trust Problem | PYMNTS. com

Amazon has released its inaugural "Trustworthy Shopping Experience" report, marking a strategic shift from focusing primarily on intellectual property to addressing a wider spectrum of marketplace risks. The e-commerce giant now frames fraud as a comprehensive trust and safety issue encompassing scams, fake reviews, product safety, and organized retail crime. To combat these threats, the company is deploying artificial intelligence systems and tightening seller verification protocols to identify risks before they impact shoppers. Claire O’Donnell, Amazon’s vice president of selling partner trust and store integrity, stated that this broader framing reflects how the company already approaches the problem internally. The new strategy prioritizes four connected areas: proactive controls, risk anticipation tools, enforcement actions against fraudsters, and consumer education. Verification processes for new sellers now check identity, business connections, and payment flows to ensure legitimacy while attempting to remain seamless for honest merchants. Artificial intelligence plays a central role in these efforts, with systems scanning billions of attempted product page changes daily. Multimodal tools analyze text, images, and supply chain patterns, while the Omniscan machine learning system verifies safety information for over 12 million products. Additionally, an early warning system utilizing social media signals successfully blocked infringing listings eight days before a brand owner reported them. Enforcement statistics highlight the scale of operations, with the Counterfeit Crimes Unit pursuing more than 32,000 fraudsters through lawsuits and criminal referrals since 2020 across 14 countries. In 2025 alone, Amazon identified and disposed of over 15 million counterfeit products globally. The company also shut down more than 100 websites tied to fake reviews and blocked hundreds of millions of suspected fraudulent reviews before publication. Despite these measures, O’Donnell noted that organized retail crime remains a significant challenge requiring collaboration between retailers, brands, and law enforcement. Amazon aims to notify affected customers directly regarding recalls and safety alerts, working with consumer organizations across seven countries. The overarching goal is to tackle trust and safety threats proactively, recognizing that large platforms must address these issues before customers encounter them.