Amazon states that it has been the victim of “large-scale” fraud. Unidentified hackers were able to transfer money from vendor accounts to their own bank accounts for six months.
Amazon thinks it was the victim of an online attack by hackers who broke into about a hundred vendor accounts. They then moved money from loans or sold it to their own bank accounts. This is apparent from legal documents from November that have now been made public, says Bloomberg. The hack took place between May and October 2018.
According to these documents, Amazon says it’s still investigating hacked accounts. The company believes that the hackers were able to adjust the details of accounts on the Seller Central platform to their own at Barclays Plc and Prepay Technologies. These organisations are partly owned by Mastercard.
The accounts were probably taken over by phishing attacks. Sellers were thus misled into sharing their login details. A company spokesman says that the investigation into the incident has been completed.
Search warrant
Amazon lawyers have asked a British judge to approve search warrants for the search of account statements from Barclays and Prepay, who have “become innocently involved in the incident”. Amazon says it needs those documents “to investigate the fraud, identify the criminals and then, determine the location of the stolen money, bring the fraud to an end and prevent future problems”.
A Barclays spokesman refused to respond to the case, but said that the bank was trying to close accounts used by criminals as soon as possible, in order to protect customers. Prepay spokespersons have not responded to the reports.
Amazon has reported that in 2018 it spent more than a billion dollars on loans to sellers. How much the hackers stole is unclear.
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