Amazon’s long battle to clear its shopping site of bad actors came to a head when a federal indictment in Washington state charged six people with conspiracy for allegedly sabotaging competing product listings and bribing internal company employees to remove negative reviews, leak information about the company’s product review algorithm and reinstate suspended accounts to gain an upper hand on the sprawling marketplace.

The group of individuals — Ed Rosenberg, Joseph Nilsen, Kristen Leccese, Hadis Nuhanovic, Rohit Kadimisetty and Nishad Kunju — allegedly paid more than $100,000 in commercial bribes to Amazon employees and contractors that resulted in more than $100 million in sales for some sellers, according to the indictment. Kadimisetty and Kunju are the only Amazon employees or contractors named in the indictment. Kadimisetty ended his employment with Amazon in December 2015 and Kunju was terminated by the company in August 2018.

After Kunju was fired, he allegedly started working with Nilsen in December 2018 to reinstate an account suspended for “safety issues” for about $5,700 that was wired to a bank account in India and transferred to an Amazon insider, according to the indictment. That same month an unnamed consultant allegedly paid Nilsen, Leccese and Kunju about $25,000 to flood the listing of a client’s competitor with fake negative reviews that resulted in a product suspension. At another point in February 2018, Rosenberg allegedly sent Nilsen a suitcase with $8,000 in cash via Uber to settle a debt for leaking internal information on Amazon seller accounts and work to lift warehouse storage hazmat limits for a seller.

The indictment exposed what has long been an open secret among sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace — a flourishing industry of so-called black hat consultants who resort to shady techniques to pummel competition, artificially boost certain listings or bypass legitimate paths to account reinstatement for a high fee, according to several sellers on Amazon and consultants to third-party businesses.

Amazon’s third-party marketplace, which makes up 53 percent of the company’s e-commerce sales, has been flooded over the last several years with bad actors who have made a business out of providing quick solutions to suspensions or negative feedback, Cynthia Stine, president of the Amazon seller service company eGrowth Partners, told NBC News.

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