An influential consultant for Amazon sellers admitted Monday to bribing employees of the e-commerce giant for information to help his clients boost sales and to get their suspended accounts reinstated.
Ephraim “Ed” Rosenberg wrote in a LinkedIn post that he will plead guilty in federal court to a criminal charge, stemming from a 2020 indictment that charged six people with conspiring to give sellers an unfair competitive advantage on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. Four of the defendants have already pleaded guilty, including one former Amazon employee who was sentenced last year to 10 months in prison.
Rosenberg, who’s based in Brooklyn, is a well-known figure in the world of Amazon third-party sellers. He runs a consultancy business that advises entrepreneurs on how to sell products on the online marketplace, and navigate unforeseen issues with their Amazon account. Rosenberg’s Facebook group for sellers, ASGTG, has over 68,000 members, and he hosts a popular conference for sellers each year.
“For a time, some years ago, I began to obtain and use Amazon’s internal annotations — Amazon’s private property — to learn the reasons for sellers’ suspensions, in order to assist them in getting reinstated, if possible,” wrote Rosenberg, who is due to appear in U.S. District Court in Seattle on March 30, for a change of plea hearing, according to court records. “On some occasions, I paid bribes, directly and indirectly, to Amazon employees to obtain annotations and reinstate suspended accounts. These actions were against the law.”
As recently as last month, in LinkedIn messages to CNBC, Rosenberg denied prosecutors’ allegations, calling the case a “conspiracy” and claiming he was framed. On Monday, Rosenberg said he “regrets” his involvement in the bribery scheme.
“In the course of this case, I have made some public statements about this prosecution and the indictment,” Rosenberg said. “Those statements are not accurate and I disavow those statements. This statement I am making now is accurate and truthful and I will continue to stand by it.”
Since at least 2017, prosecutors allege Rosenberg and other consultants allegedly bribed Amazon employees to leak information about the company’s search and ranking algorithms and to share confidential data on their competition in the marketplace. In all, the individuals allegedly paid $100,000 worth of bribes to employees and reaped more than $100 million in competitive benefits, the DOJ said.
In 2018, Amazon fired four employees in India who were allegedly connected to the bribery scheme.
Previously unsealed court documents said Rosenberg allegedly sent a “veiled threat” to an Amazon employee at the company’s Seattle headquarters as part of the bribery scheme, Bloomberg reported. The documents also detailed defendants’ elaborate efforts to dodge detection by authorities, including allegedly stuffing a llama-shaped ottoman with cash believed to be bribes, according to Bloomberg.
Rosenberg is part of what’s become a sizable industry in helping sellers navigate the complexities and chaos of the Amazon marketplace, where some 2 million sellers are responsible for more than half of the goods sold on the site. Amazon launched its online marketplace in 2000, allowing everyone from established brands to mom-and-pop shops to sell products.
While the marketplace has helped Amazon haul in tens of billions of dollars in sales, it’s also become a notorious host to counterfeit, unsafe and expired goods. Behind the scenes, scammers have for years resorted to illicit tactics to squash competitors, artificially boost their listings or bypass Amazon’s marketplace rules.
Amazon has said it invests hundreds of millions of dollars per year to ensure products are safe and compliant. The providing of internal data to sellers by employees violates Amazon’s seller policies and code of conduct.
Rosenberg said attempts to bribe Amazon employees are “wrong and criminal.”
“No one should pay bribes to Amazon employees to provide private Amazon information,” Rosenberg wrote on Monday. “If it is apparent that internal information has been illegally leaked, no one should use it. Nor should anyone pay any Amazon employees for any other special favors regarding a seller’s account.”
Rosenberg and his attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for Amazon didn’t return a request for comment.
Jared Isaacman, U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to be administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 9, 2025.
Ken Cedeno | Reuters
President Donald Trump has renominated Jared Isaacman to run NASA after pulling his prior nomination months ago due to what the president called a “thorough review of prior associations.”
“Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new Space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday.
Isaacman, who is friends with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was originally picked to lead NASA in December, before Trump had even taken office. Isaacman is a billionaire who founded payments company Shift4 and has led two private spaceflights.
But Trump pulled the nomination in late May after a spat between the president and Musk, who had been leading a White House effort to slash the size of the federal government. Trump said at the time that he was withdrawing the pick because of Isaacman’s past associations, though he didn’t specify what those were. Some reports have suggested that it was a reference to Isaacman’s prior donations to Democrats.
Days after the withdrawal, Isaacman told Shift4 investors in a letter that his “brief stint in politics was a thrilling experience.” He also said that he was resigning as CEO of Shift4, which he founded in 1999 at age 16, and would assume the role of executive chairman. He had been planning to leave the company if his nomination was confirmed by the Senate. But it never got that far.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been running NASA as interim head since July.
Isaacman still must go through the Senate confirmation process. The federal government has been shut down since the beginning of October, but the Senate is still able to confirm presidential nominees.
Charles Liang, CEO of Super Micro Computer Inc., during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 5, 2024.
Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Super Micro Computer shares plunged as much as 10% in extended trading on Tuesday after the server maker issued weaker-than-expected results for the fiscal first quarter.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with analyst estimates compiled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 35 cents adjusted vs. 40 cents expected
Revenue: $5.02 billion vs. $6 billion expected
Revenue fell 15% from $5.94 billion a year ago, Super Micro said in a statement. The report comes about two weeks after Super Micro issued preliminary earnings and said it expected revenue of $5 billion for the quarter, down from prior guidance of $6 billion to $7 billion.
Net income fell by more than half to $168.3 million, or 26 cents a share, from $424.3 million, or 67 cents a share, a year earlier.
In its partial report last month, Super Micro said “design win upgrades” pushed some expected first-quarter revenue to the second quarter. The company said it now expects sales of $10 billion to $11 billion in the current quarter, above the $7.83 billion average estimate, according to LSEG.
Super Micro has been a big beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom, as its servers come packed with graphics processing units from Nvidia. But after growth soared from late 2023 through last year, the business has flatlined, with some analysts saying that Dell has taken market share.
Prior to Tuesday’s report, the stock was up 55% for the year.
AMD CEO Lisa Su speaks at a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing in Washington on May 8, 2025. The leaders of some of the biggest technology and artificial intelligence companies will go to Congress on Thursday with a wish list of sorts that at its top has doing away with regulation they say inhibits their firms’ growth and by default, sends business to China.
Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Advanced Micro Devices reported fiscal third-quarter results that exceeded Wall Street expectations, but gave margin guidance was inline with estimates. The stock slipped in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.20 adjusted vs. $1.16 expected
Revenue: $9.25 billion vs. $8.74 billion expected
Revenue increased 36% from a year earlier in the fiscal third quarter, which ended on Sept. 27, according to a statement.
Net income climbed to $1.24 billion, or 75 cents per share, from $771 million, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier.
For the fourth quarter, AMD expects about $9.6 billion in revenue, implying 25% growth. That’s above LSEG’s $9.15 billion consensus. AMD sees an adjusted gross margin of 54.5% for the quarter, meeting StreetAccount’s consensus of 54.5%.
AMD, which is trying to keep pace with Nvidia in the market for artificial intelligence processors, said the guidance does not include revenue from shipments of its Instinct MI308 chips to China. Executives said the same thing last quarter.
As of Tuesday’s close, AMD shares were up 107% so far this year, while the Nasdaq is up 21%.
AMD reached a deal with OpenAI last month that could see the AI startup company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker. OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said, beginning with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of next year.
For years OpenAI and other companies relied on graphics chips from Nvidia for running large-scale AI models.
Also in October, Oracle announced plans to deploy 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450 AI chips in its cloud starting next year.
AMD’s data center business, which includes standard central processing units and GPUs for AI, generated $4.34 billion in fiscal third-quarter revenue, up 22%. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were looking for $4.13 billion.
Client revenue reached $2.75 billion, which was up 46% and more than StreetAccount’s $2.61 billion consensus. Revenue from gaming totaled $1.30 billion, up 181%. StreetAccount’s consensus was $1.05 billion.
Amazon, a key cloud customer for AMD, disclosed in a Tuesday filing that it had sold all 822,234 of its AMD shares as of Sept. 30. Amazon built the position sometime in the first quarter.
Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is developing news. Please check back for updates.