Senator Calls For Attorney General Criminal Investigation Into Amazon

Shocking business practices, commingled products, counterfeits, worthless endorsements, and false claims are all part of Amazon's marketplace

April 29, 2020, Los Angeles, CA – Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked the Department of Justice to open a criminal antitrust investigation into Amazon. At a time when much of the retail sector is collapsing, Amazon is strengthening its competitive position and becoming the primary provider of goods online to millions of Americans in ways that raise antitrust concerns.

Advocates have been raising the alarm that accelerating monopolization in the United States is harming consumers by consolidating retail commerce, airlines, hospitals, and telecommunications — among other industries.

According to ex-Amazon employees interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Amazon used the site’s individual third-party sellers data and sales to develop its own competing products and proprietary product strategy against other businesses competing on its platform.

An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC it doesn’t allow employees to use “non-public, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch” and said it had opened an internal investigation. The online retailing giant has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use the information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers -- data those sellers view as proprietary.

House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline said Amazon’s associate general counsel, Nate Sutton (a Bush and then Obama DOJ Antitrust attorney before leaving for Amazon in Dec 2016) “may have lied to Congress” at a hearing last year about how the company uses data from its third-party sellers to come up with its private-label products. The chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said that if true, the Journal’s report “raises deep concerns about Amazon’s apparent lack of candor before the Committee regarding an issue that is central to our investigation.”

Dharmesh M. Mehta, Vice President of Worldwide Customer Trust and Partner Support, represented Amazon before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce on March 4, 2020. Mehta is responsible for and leads the team dedicated to preventing fraud, counterfeits, fake reviews, and other forms of abuse from harming Amazon customers, brands, and selling partners. His testimony about Amazon's business practices and behavior is a shocking confirmation of Amazon's reprehensible and manipulative global system of counterfeits, fraud, deception, misrepresentation, and false advertising.

Senator Josh Hawley is urging the DOJ to open a criminal antitrust investigation into Amazon for using private data to push competitors out of business.

“This is exactly what happens when you let a giant company be both the umpire and a player in the game” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. told NBC News in a statement. “Amazon needs to explain why it misled Congress — and we need to break up Amazon and big tech. Desperate small-businesses are struggling to survive during this crisis, while large companies and private equity vultures are circling for a chance to gobble up these small-businesses and increase their already immense economic power.” “We have to make sure we protect workers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs so they are not squeezed ever further by harmful mergers now or in any future emergency” adds Sen. Warren.

Amazon is indifferent to the damage they cause to consumers, legitimate sellers, and manufacturers while fulfilling their desire to be the sole source of items for purchase. There is no incentive to clean up their websites, they make to much money. Amazon made $11.2 billion in profit in 2018, but paid no federal income tax.