Amazon is investigating allegations that some employees in India and the US are sharing internal company data with merchants, reports Wall Street Journal (paywall). The company has dismissed several employees in both countries for accessing internal data that was being misused by disreputable merchants. The report said that India was a major source of the data misuse by Amazon employees, and the company's investigation focuses on India ops. It is unclear how many sellers were affected, what the extent of the damage is, or how many India employees were involved in the misuse of data. Amazon has also deleted suspect reviews, restricted seller access to customer data, and brought down techniques which trick the site into displaying products higher in search. It is unclear which of these steps Amazon has taken in India yet. In India and China, Amazon has restricted employees' ability to search an internal database for data such as product performance or trending keywords. Some employees in India are no longer able to use their USB drives to download such data, reports the publication. MediaNama has reached out to Amazon for further details and will update this when we hear from them. What sellers did against rivals Sellers have been sabotaging their counterparts by flagging the others' product as counterfeit or infringing trademarks, which Amazon has had to remove from sale while evaluating whether they are actually fake. Sellers are also misusing accounts on Amazon's Vendor Central system to change rival sellers' product pages, by changing product photographs…
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