In the month of September, Amazon confirmed that some of their sellers in the marketplace had bribed their employees. Through those bribes, they wanted the employees to get rid of the negative reviews. Moreover, they wanted the employees to provide them with proprietary information like data related to sales or email addresses of customers. Now, news comes through that Amazon has fired at least one employee. The report says that the employee had leaked customer email addresses to a third-party seller. A third-party seller is a merchant, who sells on the website of Amazon. The company did not want to provide any further information about the seller. Amazon confirmed the news by saying that the individual, who was responsible for this incident has been terminated from their respective position. The company is currently supporting the law enforcement agency in their prosecution.
The affected customers have already been notified of the incident and the company says that no customer information was passed on to outside parties. One of those customers forwarded the email they received to a media house, which makes a note that the employee has been dismissed. The email also says that the third-party seller in question has been completely banned from the marketplace of Amazon.
The report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that the third-party sellers make use of all those middlemen to located the employees of Amazon. They, in turn, lure them by offering money for collecting internal information. This will help them to get an edge over the competitors. For Amazon, maintaining customer data is an extremely vital aspect of their business. It holds personal information, including debit and credit card numbers for more than 300 million accounts all over the world. Amazon even made a note that they were investigating into the matter. They had put into place certain systems to prevent and even audit the kind of information what employees can access.
