Amazon employees leak secret info that marketplace sellers can buy on Telegram
Workers fulfill orders at an Amazon fulfillment center on Prime Day in Melville, New York, US, on Tuesday, July 11, 2023.
Johnny Milano | Bloomberg | Getty Images
For the millions of sellers who make up the booming Amazon marketplace, few things are as perpetually concerning as the threat of getting suspended for alleged wrongdoing and watching business evaporate overnight.
Helping third-party sellers recover their accounts has turned into a large and lucrative enterprise, because the only way the merchants can get back up and running is to admit guilt and correct the issue or show sufficient evidence that they did nothing wrong. The process is often costly, lengthy and fraught with challenges.
Enter the illicit broker.
For a fee of $200 to $400, sellers can pay for services like “Amazon Magic,” as one broker on encrypted messaging service Telegram calls it. The offerings also include access to company insiders who can remove negative reviews on a product and provide information on competitors. Users are told to send a private message to learn the price of certain services.
The Telegram group has over 13,000 members, and it’s far from the only one. Other brokers peddle similar services on Telegram as well as on WeChat, WhatsApp and Facebook Groups. The confidential data is promoted as intelligence gold for any seller working to get their product or account reinstated.
The groups are part of a robust market of so-called black hat service providers that have cropped up alongside the rise of third-party marketplaces on Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart. Amazon’s marketplace now accounts for over 60% of goods sold on the platform, and includes numerous businesses that generate millions of dollars a year in annual revenue on the site.
Source: Telegram
Source: Telegram
As it’s grown, the sprawling global marketplace has also seen a surge in the number of counterfeiters and spammers trying to game the system, which has pushed Amazon to ramp up enforcement. Much of the activity originates off of Amazon’s marketplace and on social media and encrypted messaging apps, complicating the policing efforts.
A public Facebook page identified by CNBC offers an internal screenshot service with “valuable insight into your seller account, allowing you to see how Amazon employees view your account and its performance.”
Facebook parent Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The issue of rogue employees taking bribes is not a new one for Amazon. The company has in the past dealt with low-level, low-wage seller support staffers in China, India, and Costa Rica, who have accepted payments in exchange for leaking information.
Brokers, who act as middlemen between sellers and employees, often reach out to insiders on LinkedIn, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Amazon has an internal group tasked with threat analysis and response, including a team dedicated to investigating employees suspected of leaking data, the source said. The threat analysis unit monitors social media platforms for abusive groups where bad actors may congregate before engaging in illicit activity on Amazon’s marketplace.
Amazon told CNBC that it has systems in place to detect suspicious behavior like improper access to confidential data and investigates these activities, sharing information with law enforcement agencies. It reports abusive groups to social media platforms and encrypted messaging services, where bad actors are increasingly concentrating their activities in order to avoid detection, the company said.
“There is no place for fraud at Amazon and we will continue to pursue all measures to protect our store and hold bad actors accountable,” Christy Distefano, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an email.
Amazon declined to say whether it has disciplined or fired employees for leaking data in exchange for payments, beyond noting that it has zero tolerance for staffers who violate its policies.
Amazon’s ongoing bribery problem
In 2018, Amazon investigated claims that employees, primarily based in China, received payments of $80 to more than $2,000 to share confidential sales information or delete bad reviews, The Wall Street Journal reported. More recently, the Department of Justice charged six individuals in 2020 for participating in a scheme to bribe employees and contractors for internal data.
Earlier this month, the fifth defendant in the case, who is a well-known seller consultant, was sentenced to probation and house arrest after pleading guilty in March. Account annotations, internal notes from an Amazon staffer on a seller’s account, were among the confidential data being exchanged between the defendants and employees.
Amazon said it uncovered the suspicious behavior related to the bribery case in 2018 and reported it to the FBI. The company said it had “robust systems” in place to detect suspicious behavior such as fraud and abuse. Amazon has also urged social media companies to assist it with rooting out fraudulent activity like fake reviews.
While Amazon is aware of the problem and is investing in people and technology to weed it out, groups continue to proliferate into the hundreds, the person with knowledge of the issue told CNBC. Accessing groups on encrypted chat apps like Telegram, WeChat or WhatsApp may require a link or invitation.
Remi Vaughn, a spokesperson for Telegram, told CNBC in an email that “moderators proactively monitor public parts of the platform and accept user reports in order to remove content that breaches our terms of service.”
The Amazon Magic group on Telegram is public, with users advertising black hat services almost daily. Screenshots of Amazon’s internal Paragon system, which is used by seller support employees to handle cases, are distributed freely in the group. CNBC authenticated the legitimacy of the screenshots with sources knowledgeable of the system.
“Much more you can find about your account by ordering screenshots with inside information from us, as seller support sees it,” a message in the Telegram chat states.
Many of the messages in the group are in Russian, and a user who runs the group claims on Facebook to be based in Ukraine. The person didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Group administrators list a full menu of services available in an online spreadsheet. Annotations, which often include more detailed information than the suspension notifications, are priced at $180 a piece, and attacks on a competitor’s listing vary in pricing. Securing an upvote on a review, a tactic used to manipulate trustworthiness or popularity of a product, costs 50 cents. The brokers guarantee buyers they can deliver the goods within one to two business days.
Amazon sellers have for years complained of being unfairly kicked off the site without explanation. The process of getting their account back can take months, costing critical sales in the meantime. The issue was a key focus of a 16-month investigation by the House Antitrust Subcommittee into competitive practices at Amazon and other Big Tech companies.
“When Amazon turns off the faucet, everything goes to hell,” said Cynthia Stine, president of eGrowth Partners, a consultancy that helps merchants get reinstated. “I’ve had CEOs of large companies cry on the phone with me, and they’ve had to lay off their people. They’ve declared bankruptcy.”
Account annotations are like an “insurance policy” for sellers who’ve been suspended, Stine said. She said she comes across potential clients who’ve purchased annotations and are seeking to regain selling privileges roughly once or twice a month. As black hat brokers and consultants have multiplied over the years, it’s eaten into her business, Stine said.
“For a time, people wouldn’t even come to us, they would just go work with whoever they bought the data from,” she added.
Amazon has previously said it has processes in place to help sellers avoid deactivation and get reinstated when appropriate. The company disputed claims that the chaotic and costly suspension process justifies illicit tactics like buying confidential data.
“There is no place for fraud at Amazon and no excuse for resorting to illegal activities,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC last month.
Go back a decade and most Americans had never heard of Huawei. Today, the Chinese telecom giant is a symbol of how quickly China can dominate a strategic technology sector and in the process create new national security and market threats for U.S. government and industry.
Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is now worried about another Chinese company that he predicts will eclipse Huawei in both scale and consequence: BGI. It is not building cell towers or smartphones for the 5G era. It is collecting DNA.
“If Huawei was big, BGI will be even bigger,” Warner said at the CNBC CFO Council Summit in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
BGI is one of the largest genomics companies in the world. It operates DNA sequencing laboratories in China and abroad. It processes genetic data for hospitals, pharmaceutical firms and researchers across dozens of countries, according to a recent report by the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.
The company began as a Beijing-based research entity, the Beijing Genomics Institute, tied closely to China’s national genome projects. It later expanded into a global commercial powerhouse, selling DNA sequencing, prenatal testing, cancer screening, and large-scale population genetic analysis, according to an NBC News report.
Through subsidiaries, BGI says it operates in the U.S. Europe, and Japan. In several countries, it helped built national genetic databases and pandemic testing systems.
A man visits the booth of BGI at the Healthy Life Chain area of the third China International Supply Chain Expo CISCE in Beijing, capital of China, July 16, 2025.
Xinhua News Agency | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
U.S. intelligence officials believe that global footprint gives BGI access to one the largest collections of genetic data on Earth. Lawmakers have warned that genetic data is not just medical information. At scale, it becomes a strategic asset spurring a “DNA arms race,” according to a Washington Post report. DNA profiles can reveal ancestry, physical traits, disease risk, and family relationships, and when linked with artificial intelligence, the data can also be used for surveillance, tracking and long-term biological research tied to national security, according to the Washington Post’s reporting.
At the CNBC event this week, Warner continued to press for more focus on BGI. “They are hoovering up DNA data,” Warner said. “This level of experimentation on humans and intellectual property theft, we all should be concerned about it.”
Congressional investigators have previously warned that BGI maintains close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese military, according to a report from the House Select Committee on the CCP. They argue that China makes little distinction between commercial data and state security needs.
The ‘super soldier’ fear
One of the biggest fears tied to BGI and China’s broader biotech push is the possibility of a genetically enhanced soldier. U.S. officials have publicly claimed that China has explored human performance enhancement and military biotechnology. U.S. defense analysts say China’s research spans population DNA collection, military databases, and AI-driven human performance modeling, according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by U.S. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe in 2020, when he was Director of National Intelligence during President Trump’s first term.
Warner directly referenced those concerns this week.
“It’s terrifying,” Warner said.
Troops make preparations before a military parade in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 3, 2025.
Xinhua News Agency | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
Warner described China as a great nation and great competitor, and as a former telecom executive (he was among the founders of Nextel), he said what Huawei was able to execute on — producing good products at inexpensive prices before the U.S. and Western competitors were prepared — is a cautionary tale.
The BGI story looks uncomfortably familiar to Warner.
“Go back in time eight or nine years, and most people had never heard of Huawei,” he said.
Huawei rose by combining massive state support, global market access and aggressive pricing, not only outcompeting Western firms on scale and cost, but positioning itself inside the world’s telecom infrastructure before governments understood the security implications. Huawei was first placed on a U.S. trade blacklist in 2019, which banned U.S. firms from selling some technology to the Chinese tech giant over national security concerns. Chip restrictions on Huawei have since become even stricter.
But Warner said by the time the U.S. moved to restrict Huawei, “[we started to] lose a little.”
Much of the 5G backbone had already been shaped by Chinese technology.
During a separate interview with Javers at the CNBC CFO Council Summit, the Republican Chairman of the House committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Michigan congressman John Moolenaar, said “We’ve seen how they run the play of excess capacity, price manipulation, driving people out of business in different areas; they’re going to continue to run that play,” he said. “We want to be friendly with China, but China is not our friend. They are our foremost adversary,” he added.
The Soviet Union was a military and ideological competitor, but China, in tech domain after domain, Warner says — from telecom and 5G to AI, quantum computing and biotech — is a different kind of competitor.
Warner now sees BGI following a similar model in biotechnology. Like Huawei, BGI scaled rapidly with state support. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank Foundation of Defense of Democracies called upon lawmakers of both parties earlier this year to restrict BGI’s access to U.S. institutions.
Congress has been trying to pass various versions of the BIOSECURE Act, which would limit the ability of Chinese biotechs to operate in the U.S. Some U.S. hospitals and research institutions with ties to Chinese genomics firms are under federal pressure, according to the Associated Press, though some medical professionals within the U.S. say they risk losing key research support for core medical goals. BGI told the AP that the bill is “a false flag targeting companies under the premise of national security. We strictly follow rules and laws, and we have no access to Americans’ personal data in any of our work,” it said.
U.S. intel has moved too slowly, and disrupted key spying alliances
Warner said the U.S. intelligence apparatus has moved too slowly to recognize the biotech threat. He says that intelligence agencies focus too much on foreign governments and militaries, with less attention placed on commercial technology sectors. But in a world where technology supremacy is national security, Warner says more of our intelligence efforts need to reflect this shift.
Only in the past two to three years, he says, has the U.S. seriously expanded spying into AI, semiconductors, and biotechnology. Warner says we need a more “advanced approach” in this area, and he gave as one recent example when China’s largest chipmaker SMIC stunned U.S. officials by producing a six-nanometer chip despite sweeping U.S. export controls. The breakthrough showed that Washington had underestimated both China’s technical qualities and ability to work around restrictions. “We got caught off guard with the SMIC six-nanometer chip,” Warner said.
Warner is also worried that tracking China’s tech rise requires a type of deep cooperation with U.S. allies that the Trump administration has squandered, such as the global intelligence-sharing network called the “Five Eyes” alliance.
Those relationships are now under strain, he said, and key partners including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France have gone public in saying they are reluctant to share intel with the U.S. “They feel like we may be politicizing the intel product and that is not good news for America,” Warner said.
Underlying his concerns about the technology competition with China in areas including AI and biotech is the U.S. ceding the global lead in standards setting. For decades, the U.S. shaped the rules for wireless networks, satellites, and internet infrastructure. That dominance help Americans lead global markets, Warner said, but now China is aggressively positioning itself as the international standards setter.
Warner described the U.S. role in international bodies as one of the “secret sauces” in the era of America’s dominance of the global economy and technology, allowing the U.S. to leverage innovations occurring around the globe, “even if it didn’t arise in America.”
Across technology domains, influencing standards and protocols is critical to not only maintaining a competitive edge but also establishing ethical boundaries. “Will it be us or the Chinese?” Warner said. “The Chinese come in with clearly a less humanist approach. It’s been effective in lots of domains. We see it on standards-setting bodies. China floods the zone with lots of engineers, almost buying off the votes. We’ve got to reengage for American business and government,” he said.
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