E-Commerce Giant Amazon Hit By ‘Extensive’ Fraud; Hackers Milked Merchant Funds Between May And October 2018

It is believed that Amazon.com Inc has been a victim of ‘extensive’ fraud. The fraud has been going on about for six months since last year. Unidentified hackers were able to extract funds from merchant accounts, reports Livemint.

Hackers broke into around 100 seller accounts between May and October 2018 and funnelled cash from loans and sales into their bank account, Amazon claims in the filing which is now public.

While Amazon is still looking into the matter, it is believed that the hackers were successful in modifying account details on Seller Central platform to their own at Barclays Plc and Prepay Technologies Ltd, which is partly owned by Mastercard.

Amazon lawyers have asked a London judge to allow them to look into the account statements at Barclays and Prepay, who ‘have become innocently mixed up in the wrongdoing’.

In the court files, the company lawyers wrote that “to investigate the fraud, identify and pursue the wrongdoers, locate the whereabouts of misappropriated funds, bring the fraud to an end and deter future wrongdoing.’

The company on Tuesday (7 May) said that it had given out over one billion dollars in loans to merchants in 2017. There is no clarity over the amount of money stolen by hackers.