Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit filed a lawsuit against companies and individuals it alleged obtained invalid trademarks or filed fake complaints to have Amazon remove their competitors from the Amazon store.
“This lawsuit sends a clear message that Amazon will pursue all measures to hold bad actors accountable and support our selling partners,” Kebharu Smith, director of Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit, said in a Monday (Sept. 16) press release. “The defendants in this case knowingly deceived Amazon’s selling partners, customers and store, or they helped to facilitate the deceptive conduct.”
The lawsuit named multiple defendants that Amazon alleged obtained invalid trademarks, used those trademarks to gain access to the Amazon Brand Registry, and then submitted false infringement notices to have their competitors removed from the store, according to the release.
The Brand Registry is a free service launched by Amazon in 2017 that helps brands protect their brand and intellectual property (IP) rights, the release said. The company’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit is a global team that partners with law enforcement, brands and other stakeholders to combat counterfeiters.
Amazon’s lawsuit also named two other defendants, alleging that they facilitated this scheme and collected fees from their clients to do so, per the release.
“This lawsuit intends to shut down defendants’ operation, preventing them from harming others across the entire retail supply chain,” Smith said in the release.
Amazon filed its first lawsuits targeting allegedly abusive notice submitters in 2023 and said the new lawsuit marks a new offensive against the practice, according to the release.
Since the company’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit was launched in 2020, the team has pursued litigation and criminal referrals to law enforcement against 21,000 companies and disposed of 7 million counterfeit products, per the release.
When announcing the launch of the unit in 2020, Amazon said it blocked 2.5 million possible bad actor accounts and that there were over 6 billion suspected bad listings during the previous year.
The Counterfeit Crimes Unit has invested in advanced machine learning techniques to improve its proactive controls and counterfeit detection systems, Amazon said in November.
