- In the Criminal Justice System,
Counterfeit based offenses
are considered, especially heinous.
At Amazon, their dedicated detectives
who investigate these crimes
are members of an elite squad
known as the Counterfeit Claims Unit.
These are their stories.
(loud bang)
- So I was selling a lot of copies of my book on Amazon.
I mean, we're talking dozens per day
and I was giving a pretty good rank
everything was awesome until one day,
all of my books just stop selling.
They're just, literally just comes to a screeching halt.
But I go to check out my product page
and lo and behold, the rank is maintaining.
And it got me kinda wondering why,
what's going on here?
And so I go to order one of the copies of my book
only to discover that a third-party seller
had been selling a fake version of my book.
And the reason why it was fake, was opened it up
and there was things in there
that I hadn't put it in there originally.
And so I reached out to Amazon to try to take this down
and they ended up taking it down
but I didn't any earnings in the process.
(loud bang)
- Okay.
Bad actors are at it again.
Oh yeah, that last story is actually true.
That really is, like, that's what is happening right now.
There's a full on Dumpster Fire going on over
in Amazon, not surprising, obviously.
Book sales are up one day and we're talking like,
it's consistent over the course of like weeks, months.
And then all of a sudden, it just drops.
You go into your dashboard, it's gone.
But you look at your rank and it's not dropping.
Sometimes, maybe it's increasing,
which if you're not selling anything,
your rank is definitely gonna be dropping
in the Amazon marketplace.
So that kinda gets you going,
like what the heck happened here?
So to be clear, Amazon allows third-party sellers
to sell your books there if they for some reason,
find a used copy in a store or maybe they,
somebody buys it and they decide
they're gonna go ahead and sell it.
They're allowed to do that.
They actually can put it on your product page.
Now that's, there's nothing wrong with that.
They actually allow that to happen.
And in fact, actually, have you ever de-listed
one of your print books, discovered that
the product page is still there?
Well, they leave that up to the third-party sellers
to sell used copies of your book.
In fact, it's sometimes kinda crazy
if you ever look over at one of your listings
and see your book for like $900.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's because they, I'm sure they believe that
since they have one of the last remaining copies
that it's a collector's edition of sorts that,
someone's gonna spend $900 on it, yeah.
But that's not the issue that we're running into here.
It's not the used copies.
Those aren't counterfeit,
they're selling those legitimately.
There are some though
that are kinda slipping in here in here.
New York Times actually covered this in a post where
they talked a little bit about the actual classic
of Orson Welles, 1984.
And in the article, they actually stated,
one reader discovered to his surprise
that his new copy of 1984 had passages
that were worded slightly different.
Another offered photographic proof
that her edition was near gibberish.
A third said the word faces was replaced
in his copy with feces.
Yeah, feces instead of faces.
And also getting Orwell books that skip a chunk
of pages seem to be a routine experience.
Yeah, so what's not happening is,
people aren't just getting used copies,
what's happening is third-party sellers
are coming in and they're essentially counterfeiting
these books and maybe shipping them
in from like India or China
or wherever else they're doing it.
And putting it onto those listings there
and kind of disguising themselves
as the legitimate listing.
Well, in-comes Amazon because obviously
they're not gonna put up with too much BS.
They'll stand it for a little bit.
And then before long, when people are really yelling at them
and saying, hey, you're stealing my money,
you're not taking care of people
that are stealing my intellectual property
or even counterfeiting it.
So their response came over on June 24, 2020
in which they said, the Counterfeit Claims Unit,
it's a global team made up former federal prosecutors,
experienced investigators and data analysts.
They will support the company's substantial efforts
already underway to protect its store from counterfeits.
In 2019, Amazon invested over $500 million
and had more than 8,000 employees fighting fraud and abuse,
including counterfeit.
Amazon's efforts have blocked over two and a half million
suspected bad actor accounts
before they were able to make a single product
available for sale and block over 6 billion
suspected bad listings in 2019.
Wow, so they're already actively trying
to put out the buyers and keep people
from coming on there and discovering some of them.
But there's three issues in this.
They've got this Counterfeit Claims Unit
and they say up to 8,000 people
are working hard inside this but the problem is,
is how do they enforce that?
Sure, they can kick them off of the platform
but it still doesn't stop the fact that
someone was counterfeiting goods,
making fake things on their platform.
So it puts a little bit of mystery on Amazon's face
and they're pretty much saying,
well, we'll take care of it.
We'll make sure the laws enforced
in whatever region it comes from.
So the three issues I see here is,
it's working with regional law enforcement.
Sure, maybe in the United States,
they'll be able to kind of take care of some issues.
But when you start to get outside of the United States
and you go into other regions,
whether it be India or China,
how much are the law enforcement officials
going to help Amazon track down
some of these people that are doing counterfeit goods
through their company?
They actually end up saying urge governments
to give these authorities, the investigative tools,
funding and resources they need
to bring criminal counterfeiters to justice
because criminal enforcement through prosecution
and other disruption measures such as freezing assets,
is one of the most effective way to stop them.
So they're saying essentially like, okay,
some of them came in and they were able
to use Amazon's platform.
And oh, we caught you.
And now they're trying to go over
to these local government agencies or law enforcement
and saying, okay, we're gonna get them
to freeze all the assets because they were stealing
from our customers at this point.
So freeze everything that they have.
And if they have some printers over there,
they're doing it, you gotta freeze those assets,
things like that.
Yeah, good luck with that.
I'm not really sure, Amazon obviously is a billion-dollar
or trillion-dollar company at this point.
Maybe they have enough, have a legal team
that can handle something like that.
But I'm hard-pressed to seeing,
especially the number of cases
that they're gonna be able to get
every single one of these things.
And the, comes up to the next issue now,
can they do it discover all of them?
No, not really.
They're gonna be allowing most, anybody
that's willing to put together a seller account
on Amazon to put products onto the marketplace.
And they rarely ever really vet any of those things.
So sometimes it's up to the customer to report the issue.
So customers actually have to hit that little report,
the abuse on a specific product detail page
to actually report these issues.
But here the issue is, there's a few types of customers
and of those customers, you're gonna actually have
some that will return it.
They go, okay, no.
This has feces instead of faces
or it's missing three pages here.
I don't know what the heck happened.
What's all these little, like weird,
like symbols here, like, I don't understand this.
They just return it.
They're just gonna return it, get a refund.
It's whatever.
Then you got the other people that will report it.
And sometimes,
they're gonna go ahead
and pair those two things together.
They'll return it and they'll report it.
I don't know that there's very much overlap
when it comes to that.
Not too many people realize there is a report option.
Most times they're just gonna blame Amazon
and just do South.
They go, oh, this is garbage, Amazon.
They send it back, they ask for a refund.
They're not aware of the report abuse button
that's available on all Amazon pages.
And then there's this other majority of people.
There's a lot of people that will probably buy a book
and maybe let it stay and never read it.
They just go ahead and they just buy it.
And those counterfeiters are hoping
that those people will just buy it
and never return it or report it.
And that's the scary situation.
They just live with it.
And they're unaware sometimes of the two previous things.
Some people don't even realize
they can actually get a refund from Amazon
and how great they are and how liberal they are
when it comes to giving back the money
to people when they ask for refund
within the 30-day window.
And sometimes it's even beyond that.
And even more so, is knowing that the report buttons there,
like, again, some people go, oh, this is a bad product.
That's Amazon's fault.
Not necessarily a seller's fault.
People think that's the Amazon.
So it all kind of falls back on them.
And instead when it's happening
is they have a jaded customer.
And the third, really the final issue,
who gets the forfeited earnings?
Now, when somebody discovers a counterfeit account,
obviously Amazon is going to shut it down
and they keep hold of that money.
And it's not like they take that money and disperse it to
the person whose intellectual property was violated.
They're not sending it to some, any author
who was having say 36, 48 titles
that were doing really, really well,
one minute and drops off, no.
Amazon's keeping it for themselves.
What are they doing with those forfeited earnings?
And are they, when they go for litigation,
are they getting that money back that
the counterfeit people were taking?
So, it just kinda makes you kinda scratch
your head because they're not giving it to the people
that rightfully deserve it,
which is probably the customer who's been screwed over.
And if they're not giving it back to the customer,
then they need to be giving it over to the IP owner.
And the other big thing to kinda think about is,
what's stopping bad actors from just getting a VPN,
setting up another business account
and just doing it all over?
They can just literally like,
this is stuff that they're used to.
They're like, screw it.
Okay, I got this account ban.
All right, I'll just go in through another way.
So I'll just disguise myself
as something completely different,
get a different LLC EIN that I can go ahead
and file through there.
And bing, bang, boom, I'm back in.
That happens quite a bit.
I know that inside this our publishing industry,
it happens quite a bit where someone gets banned,
they slip back in underneath a different limited liability
corporation or a company or they're doing it through
an incorporation of some sort.
If this has been very useful to you
and you wanna learn a little bit more about how
to publish books that sell.
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And did you know about
the internet archives pirating books?
Well, seemingly pirating books
and they're doing it through the actual library system.
So we're going to check it out in this very next video.
It's gonna blow your mind,
the audacity that internet archives actually has here.
I'll see you there.