Amazon Recasts Marketplace Fraud as a Broader Trust Problem

Amazon is making a broader argument about fraud in online commerce. The threat is no longer limited to fake handbags, copycat electronics and trademark abuse. It now stretches across scams, fake reviews, product safety, organized retail crime and seller manipulation.

In its first “Trustworthy Shopping Experience” report, Amazon said it is using artificial intelligence (AI), tighter seller checks and wider enforcement efforts to stop many of those threats before they reach shoppers or merchants.

The report marks a shift from Amazon’s earlier brand protection reports, which focused largely on counterfeits and intellectual property. The new version keeps those themes but widens the frame to include what Amazon describes as four connected priorities: proactive controls, tools that anticipate risk, action against fraudsters and consumer education.

Claire O’Donnell, Amazon’s vice president of selling partner trust and store integrity, said that broader framing better reflects how the company already thinks about the problem.

“The approach we’ve taken to the report this year for the first time is this much broader look at our trust and safety efforts,” O’Donnell told PYMNTS. “A key cornerstone … is how do we get more proactive” so Amazon can identify issues with sellers or products ahead of time and keep them from reaching customers.

That push starts before many sellers even begin operating on the platform. Amazon said all new sellers must complete a verification process designed to make it easier for legitimate businesses to join while making it harder for fraudsters to get in. The company said it checks identity, business links and payment flows, then continues monitoring sellers over time.

O’Donnell said the goal is to add protection without burdening honest merchants.

“Our goal is those verifications are seamless for legitimate selling partners, but they’re very difficult for bad actors to game,” she said. “Are you a real person? Are you connected to a real business? Does the money flow to that real business?”

AI Comes to the Rescue

AI is playing a larger role in that effort. Amazon said its systems scan billions of attempted product page changes each day, while multimodal tools analyze text, images, seller behavior and supply chain patterns for signs of abuse. The company also said its Omniscan machine learning system has generated image sets for more than 12 million products to help verify required safety information before listings go live in several markets.

The company is also emphasizing prediction, not just detection. Amazon said an early warning system that pulls in signals from social media and other retailers helped it block infringing listings tied to a viral branded product eight days before the brand owner had even shared its intellectual property with Amazon. The report also pointed to SENTRIX, an AI system that Amazon said has improved its ability to identify and remove phishing sites, helping lift successful takedowns of phishing URLs by more than 10%.

For O’Donnell, the message is that these threats increasingly overlap.

“I think that’s exactly right,” she said when asked whether trust and safety now looks more like one connected problem than a series of separate ones. “We’re just sharing more of that interconnected trust and safety strategy externally.”

Amazon used the report to underscore the scale of its enforcement work. It said its Counterfeit Crimes Unit has pursued more than 32,000 fraudsters through lawsuits and criminal referrals since 2020 across 14 countries. In 2025 alone, the company said it identified and disposed of more than 15 million counterfeit products worldwide. It also said legal action helped shut down more than 100 websites tied to fake reviews and scams targeting the Amazon store, while its systems blocked hundreds of millions of suspected fake reviews before they appeared online.

Connecting With Customers

Amazon is also trying to show that trust extends beyond the transaction itself. The company said it directly contacted millions of customers in 2025 with product safety information and worked with 34 consumer organizations on 71 safety topics across seven countries. Its recalls and safety alerts page is designed to notify affected customers when governments announce recalls and direct them to refund, return or repair options.

Still, O’Donnell said the hardest challenge may be one that no platform can solve alone.

“It’s really organized retail crime,” she said. “It’s a coordinated criminal enterprise.”

She said retailers, brands and law enforcement will need to work together to stop networks that target supply chains, logistics systems and digital storefronts at scale.

That may be the central point of Amazon’s new report. Marketplace fraud is no longer just a counterfeit problem or a seller problem. It is a broader trust problem, and one that large platforms increasingly believe must be tackled before customers ever see the threat.