Following report on fake PS5 games sold on Amazon India, the company has finally responded to our request for comment. Interestingly, it claims that it would remove sellers for putting counterfeit goods up for sale.
We wonder how that would work when the seller in question is Cloudtail, which Amazon has a considerable stake in. Nonetheless, the e-commerce giant claims that it has sizeable investments in machine learning and automated systems to prevent fake PS5 games from going on sale.
This seems tone-deaf when the reason for this is Amazon’s own lax returns policy as we pointed out in our report. All the software engineers, applied scientists, program managers, and investigators employed by the company mean nothing when fake games returned by unscrupulous customers (while they pocket genuine games to resell later) make their way to the rest of us that actually want to play video games.
All this is further compounded by a statistic revealed by Amazon that 99.9 percent of all products viewed globally don’t have a valid counterfeit complaint. Sources familiar with the company’s India operations tell us that such complaints are a lot higher here and that Amazon India is slow to react.
Amazon is roughly 20 to 30 percent of the Indian console games market, and seen as many as the go to place for video game purchases. However, it doesn’t take the business as seriously as it should.
One popular example in the games industry, we’re told is how Sony and multiple game publishers had to get involved at global level to make Amazon India remove sellers peddling PS accounts that was against the PlayStation maker’s terms of service and a legal grey area following a report on The Mako Reactor. Nonetheless, here’s Amazon India’s response in full:
Our customers expect that when they make a purchase through Amazon’s marketplace they will receive authentic products. Amazon strictly prohibits the sale of counterfeit products and we invest heavily in both funds and company energy to ensure our policy is followed. We work with and empower brands and sellers through programs like Brand Registry, Transparency, and Project Zero to ensure only authentic products are sold on our marketplace.
We investigate any claim of counterfeit thoroughly, including removing the item, permanently removing the bad actor, pursuing legal action as appropriate.
In order to detect bad actors and potentially counterfeit products, we make significant investments in machine learning and automated systems. We employ dedicated teams of software engineers, applied scientists, program managers, and investigators to operate and continually refine our anti-counterfeiting programs.
Amazon’s systems automatically and continuously scan numerous data points related to selling partners, products, brands, and offers to detect activity that may indicate a potentially counterfeit product and immediately block or remove it from our marketplace. 99.9% of all products viewed by customers on Amazon globally did not have a valid counterfeit complaint.
