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.
The founder of the company behind the IRL social media app was charged with defrauding investors of $170 million in the company’s 2021 funding round, the Department of Justice said Wednesday.
A federal grand jury in Oakland federal court indicted Abraham Shafi, 38 of Hawaii, with wire fraud, securities fraud and obstruction in connection with the scheme, the DOJ said.
Shafi was the CEO of Get Together, the parent company of IRL. The company was valued at $1 billion after its 2021 Series C funding round. IRL, which shuttered in June 2023, was a platform for users to organize events and offline activities. It found some traction in 2018, ranking among Apple’s top social apps.
Shafi allegedly spent millions on incentive advertising to boost installs of the app leading up to the Series C while maintaining to investors that the company spent “very little” on getting new users, the DOJ said.
He then concealed the expense by invoicing it to another firm, the DOJ said.
The indictment also alleges that the CEO and his fiancée used investor funds for “luxury hotel stays, luxury clothing, purchases from home furnishing retailers, thousands of dollars for art classes, and hundreds of thousands of dollars for SHAFI’s wedding, including payments for wedding guests’ airfare and luxury hotels.”
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Shafi told CNBC in February 2018 that investors backed the company on its potential to compete with Facebook and Snapchat. Investors in IRL included Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the venture firm Floodgate.
Shafi’s co-founders at IRL included Scott Banister, the first board member of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, among others.
Only Shafi was named in the DOJ indictment. He faces a max of 20 years in prison on each count, the DOJ said.
“Shafi took advantage of investors’ appetite for investments in the pre-IPO technology space and fraudulently raised approximately $170 million by lying about IRL’s business practices,” Monique Winkler, director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office, said in a release at the time.
A news ticker outside Fox News headquarters reads: Grand jury votes to indict former President Donald Trump, at the News Corporation building in New York City, U.S., March 31, 2023.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
In less than three days, college football will be showcasing one of its most-highly anticipated week one matchups ever, with top-ranked Texas heading on the road to play reigning national champion and third-ranked Ohio State.
Fox is airing the much-hyped game. YouTube TV subscribers may be out of luck.
Google‘s YouTube said on Monday it may remove channels like Fox Broadcast Network, Fox News and Fox Sports if the company is unable to reach a new agreement with Fox Corp. by 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday. The two sides are still in a standoff, putting YouTube TV customers at risk of missing out on major sporting events and hefty ad dollars in limbo.
For Google, the issue is how much Fox is charging for its content.
“Fox is asking for payments that are far higher than what partners with comparable content offerings receive,” YouTube wrote in its Monday blog post.
YouTube TV has roughly 9.4 million subscribers. Most notably for sports fans, Fox is the home for many upcoming football games, both college and pro. The NFL season begins next week, with Fox set to air games starting on Sunday, Sept. 7
YouTube pays broadcasters like Fox to carry their channels.
In addition to football, Fox shows Major League Baseball games, and the MLB regular season is entering its final stretch. Fox will be airing some playoff games that follow, as well as the World Series, which is scheduled to start in late October.
Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, weighed in on Tuesday.
“Google removing Fox channels from YouTube TV would be a terrible outcome,” he said on X. “Millions of Americans are relying on YouTube to resolve this dispute so they can keep watching the news and sports they want — including this week’s Big Game: Texas @ Ohio State. Get a deal done Google!”
The Texas – Ohio State game has added intrigue as its Arch Manning’s first marquee start as quarterback for the top-ranked Longhorns.
The hefty roster of Fox programs may be enough for sports fans to turn off YouTube TV in favor of other options. One place subscribers could turn to is Fox One, Fox’s standalone streaming service, which just launched last week, ahead of the NFL season. Fox One costs $19.99 per month or $199.99 annually.
The base plan for YouTube TV costs $82.99 per month and includes over 100 live channels and unlimited cloud DVR. If Fox does go offline for an extended period of time, YouTube will give members a $10 credit, the Google company said.
YouTube recently overtook Netflix, which has a market cap of $518 billion, as the top streaming platform in terms of audience engagement.
While YouTube and Fox have set a deadline of Wednesday to reach a deal, it’s common for carriage disputes to result in a deadline extension that would give the parties more time to negotiate.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google has eliminated more than one-third of its managers overseeing small teams, an executive told employees last week, as the company continues its focus on efficiencies across the organization.
“Right now, we have 35% fewer managers, with fewer direct reports” than at this time a year ago, said Brian Welle, vice president of people analytics and performance, according to audio of an all-hands meeting reviewed by CNBC. “So a lot of fast progress there.”
At the meeting, employees asked Welle and other executives about job security, “internal barriers” and Google’s culture after several recent rounds of layoffs, buyouts and reorganizations.
Welle said the idea is to reduce bureaucracy and run the company more efficiently.
“When we look across our entire leadership population, that’s mangers, directors and VPs, we want them to be a smaller percentage of our overall workforce over time,” he said.
The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter. Many of those managers stayed with the company as individual contributors, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are private.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai weighed in at the meeting, reiterating the need for the company “to be more efficient as we scale up so we don’t solve everything with headcount.”
Google eliminated about 6% of its workforce in 2023, and has implemented cuts in various divisions since then. Alphabet finance chief Anat Ashkenazi, who joined the company last year, said in October that she would push cost cuts “a little further.” Google has offered buyouts to employees since January, and the company has slowed hiring, asking employees to do more with less.
Regarding the buyouts, executives at the town hall said that a total of 10 product areas have presented “Voluntary Exit Program” offers. They’ve applied to U.S.-based employees in search, marketing, hardware and people operations teams this year.
Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, said at last week’s meeting that between 3% and 5% of employees on those teams have accepted the buyouts.
“This has been actually quite successful,” she said, adding “I think we can continue it.”
Pichai said the company executed the voluntary buyouts after listening to employees, who said they preferred that route to blanket layoffs.
“It’s a lot of work that’s gone into implementing the VEP program, and I’m glad we’ve done it,” Pichai said. “It gives people agency, and I’m glad to see it’s worked out well.”
‘Wanting a career break’
Cicconi said one of the main reasons employees are taking the buyouts is because they want to take time off from work.
“It’s actually quite interesting to see who’s taking a VEP, and it’s people sort of wanting a career break, sometimes to take care of family members,” she said.
CNBC previously reported that the layoffs hurt morale as the company was downsizing while at the same time issuing blowout earnings and seeing its stock price jump. Alphabet’s shares are up 10% this year after climbing 36% in 2024 and 58% the year prior.
At another point in the town hall, employees asked if Google would consider a policy similar to Meta’s “recharge,” a month-long sabbatical that employees earn after five years at the company.
“We have a lot of leaves, not least our vacation, which is there for exactly that — resting and recharging,” said Alexandra Maddison, Google’s senior director of benefits.
She said the company is not going to offer paid sabbatical.
“We’re very confident that our current offering is competitive,” Maddison said.
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other executives jumped in to compare the two companies’ benefits.
“I don’t think they have a VEP at Meta by the way,” Cicconi said.
Pichai then asked, to some laughs from the audience, “Should we incorporate all policies of Meta while we’re at it? Or should we only pick and choose the few policies we like?”
“Maybe I should try running the company with all of Meta’s policies,” he continued. “No, probably not.”