In November 2024, Jack Nekara’s Amazon store got shut down.
The American entrepreneur had invented a small product called Bed Scrunchies in 2020 — an adjustable elastic band that keeps bedsheets locked tight onto the mattress. A humble item, but it was pulling in $6 million a year in sales, the vast majority through Amazon.
The reason for the shutdown: “violation of review policy.” He’d run a promotion that rewarded customers for leaving reviews. To Amazon’s algorithms, that’s a red line.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Nekara had just stocked 30,000 units of inventory, with TV ad spots already booked. About $90,000 in pending disbursements was frozen in his account. You can imagine his state of mind.
A few weeks later, a woman named Jenna reached out. A Chinese immigrant living in California, she initially offered to help Nekara sell his products on Temu. Over four video calls, Nekara vented about his Amazon troubles. Jenna listened, then said: “I sell bedding too, I know a lot of people — let me see if I can help.”
What happened next forms the core of a joint investigation by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg published in June 2026.
Through an “acquaintance” she knew inside Amazon, Jenna obtained the internal records showing why Nekara’s account had been suspended. She sent him screenshots. Then she named her price: a 20% bribe on the frozen amount, and she could arrange for an Amazon insider to unfreeze that $90,000.
Nekara didn’t take the offer. Jenna sweetened the deal: if he was willing to sell his company at a discount, her contact could get the account reactivated. After that, Jenna went dark.
Nekara handed the recorded conversations and screenshots over to Amazon. Amazon said they’d investigate, then — radio silence. Later, they told him the employee who leaked his account information had already been fired for unrelated misconduct.
Image: Bloomberg / LA Times investigation illustration. Source: Gigazine / LA Times
This Isn’t a One-Off — It’s a Full-Blown Gray-Market Industry
What happened to Nekara isn’t an isolated incident. Bloomberg’s investigation found a remarkably mature “middleman” market operating on encrypted chat apps — WeChat, in particular. The business model is brutally simple:
Step one: Show “proof.” The middleman first shows you internal Amazon account records — screenshots revealing why your store was suspended, internal notes, processing status. The goal here isn’t to help you. It’s to prove “I can really reach the internal systems.” In the trade, they call this “laying the bait.”
Step two: Name the price. The service menu includes: reinstating selling privileges, recovering frozen funds, deleting negative reviews, restoring delisted product pages. Pricing is typically 20% of the amount recovered, or a per-item fee.
Step three: Attack your competitors. For an extra fee, a middleman can arrange for insiders to go after your rivals: re-categorize their best-selling product as an “adult item” (burying it at the bottom of search results), tamper with product descriptions and images, split color variants of the same product into orphaned pages so you can’t consolidate your traffic. NBC reported a case back in 2020: a massage-gun seller who’d been at it for four years watched his top-selling product get split apart, recategorized as adult goods, and have its images altered — repeatedly. He’d get Amazon to fix it, and the next day it would be changed right back. Behind the scenes: a competitor had paid someone with internal access.
Step four: Collect payment. Usually handled offshore. Middlemen are predominantly based in China and India, while the Amazon insiders on the “execution end” tend to be located in outsourcing hubs like Hyderabad, India, and Costa Rica — places where customer support and marketplace operations are concentrated.
People Went to Prison for This in 2020. Why Is It Still Happening Six Years Later?
Here’s what makes this unsettling: the black market is thriving despite a clear criminal precedent. People went to jail for this in 2020. The same supply chain is still running in 2026.
In September 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging six individuals. The key operator was Nishad Kunju, 31, a former Amazon seller-support employee based in Hyderabad, India. He started taking bribes while still employed, and after leaving, pivoted to a “consultant” role — recruiting and bribing former colleagues who still had access. They operated from at least 2017 through 2020, paying over $100,000 in bribes to more than ten Amazon employees and contractors to “resurrect” hundreds of suspended seller accounts.
What were those resurrected accounts selling? Dietary supplements flagged for safety hazards, household electronics marked as flammable, products found to infringe intellectual property, storefronts shut down for review manipulation. All put back online. Once illicitly reinstated, those accounts collectively raked in over $100 million from Amazon.
In 2022, the first defendant in this case was sentenced to 10 months in prison plus a $50,000 fine. Five were ultimately convicted in the U.S.
By 2025, Indian police had filed charges against 22 former Amazon employees, accusing them of taking bribes from freight companies during their tenure at Indian operations centers in exchange for preferential delivery routing, involving roughly ₹102 crore (~$1.2 billion).
And Nekara’s experience in June 2026 tells you everything you need to know: shut down one batch, and the next has already filled the gap.
Why Does Platform Governance Feel Like Whack-a-Mole?
Professor Henry Pontel of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice offers a two-word explanation: the outsourcing dilemma.
Amazon has outsourced massive swaths of marketplace operations to low-cost labor markets — India, China, and beyond. These workers handle seller appeals, review product listings, manage the review system — they hold the kill-switch over third-party sellers, and their monthly salary might be a few hundred dollars. When a seller is willing to pay $20,000 to unfreeze an account, that’s several years of wages.
Cross-border law enforcement coordination is desperately weak. As Pontel put it bluntly: “China, in particular, severely restricts U.S. companies from seeking law enforcement help. Employees are well aware they’re unlikely to be extradited or prosecuted.”
Amazon’s official statement reads: “As one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, we constantly face the risk of bad actors exploiting our business to commit fraud or engage in unethical behavior. In rare cases, employees may be involved in such activities. We invest heavily in this area, with dedicated teams and systems to prevent a wide range of fraud, including that perpetrated by our own employees.”
That’s not a lie. Amazon does have anti-fraud teams, and they did cooperate with the 2020 federal investigation. But the structural contradiction remains: the more a platform relies on low-cost human operations, the larger the rent-seeking surface area created by internal access. The more distributed those access points, the harder it is to trace abuse.
What Does Any of This Have to Do With Regular Shoppers?
You might be thinking: this is seller-on-seller trench warfare — what does it have to do with me buying a set of bedsheet bands?
More than you’d think.
First, the negative reviews that convinced you not to buy something? They might already be deleted. When sellers can pay to remove bad reviews, the signal in the review system goes haywire. You’re used to scanning the one-star reviews to avoid landmines — but in the face of this black market, the list of negative reviews itself is editable.
Second, that five-star product with glowing reviews may not have been reviewed by real users. A seller of dangerous dietary supplements gets delisted and buried in bad reviews, pays a few thousand dollars to an insider to get reinstated, then runs a round of fake reviews. The Amazon search ranking algorithm pushes it right back to the top — and you’re the person who sees 4.7 stars and 500 glowing reviews and clicks “buy.”
Third, that great product you can never seem to find might have existed — until a competitor paid to make it disappear. When an honest seller’s product is suddenly recategorized as “adult goods,” its listing split apart, its images tampered with, and the official appeals queue takes weeks to reach — they can go bankrupt in that window. And you’ll never know the product was ever there.
To Be Fair, Both Sides Have a Point
The most valuable thing about this investigation is that it presents a structural dilemma rather than a simple “good guys vs. bad guys” story.
From the seller’s side: Amazon’s appeals system genuinely has efficiency problems. After an account gets suspended, the official channel can take weeks to respond. During that window, funds are frozen, inventory piles up, ad campaigns stop running. For a seller doing millions in annual revenue at a 10–15% margin, a few weeks of cash-flow interruption can be fatal. In that kind of desperation, when a middleman shows up holding internal screenshots of your account and offers “20% to unfreeze” — it’s not a moral choice. It’s a survival one.
From Amazon’s side: they’re processing a tidal wave of seller appeals, product reviews, and listing disputes every week. They can’t offer VIP concierge service to every seller. Using automation plus low-cost human labor is a function of their cost structure. And they do investigate insiders and cooperate with law enforcement — but with over 200 million active users and millions of third-party sellers, a 20-person anti-fraud team is a drop in the ocean.
There’s no easy fix. Lowering the appeals bar invites abuse from bad actors. Improving operational efficiency requires more outsourced labor, and outsourcing is itself the leak vector.
A Note for Those Who Shop on Taobao, JD.com — and Also Browse Amazon
The playbook you’ve seen on domestic Chinese e-commerce platforms — deleting bad reviews, flooding good ones, sabotaging competitors — is happening in a different language and currency on the world’s largest online marketplace. The difference is, the middlemen here don’t need to find an inside connection at the platform itself (domestic platforms are more centralized with tighter access controls). They find Amazon’s outsourced operations staff, scattered across the globe.
Are Nekara’s Bed Scrunchies still for sale? I combed through Amazon search results and couldn’t find them. The LA Times report says his account still hasn’t been reinstated. And Jenna? She vanished and hasn’t resurfaced.
Amazon’s spokesperson said they’d investigate. By the time I finished writing this piece, those words sounded awfully familiar — on domestic Chinese platforms, we’ve heard the same promise too many times to count.
Reference Links
- Shadow bribery market inside Amazon preys on desperate sellers — Los Angeles Times
- Amazon seller reveals rare glimpse of shadow bribery market — Mercury News / Bloomberg
- Hacker News discussion (102 points, 57 comments)
- Six indicted in scheme to bribe Amazon employees — DOJ (2020)
- $100,000 in bribes helped fraudulent Amazon sellers earn $100 million — Ars Technica (2020)
- Amazon’s complaint leads to FIR against 22 ex-employees — Times of India (2025)
- The reality of Amazon’s shady bribery practices — GIGAZINE (2026)