Online Sellers Beware: Amazon FBA Consultant Marketing SCAM

Many Amazon sellers look for extra help by Google searching Amazon Consultants or Amazon Marketing, but the seller can quickly end up tangled up in the "Black Hat" industry, which ultimately leads to a permanent ban from Amazon. 

What is "Black Hat" Marketing?

If you haven't heard this term, Black Hat Marketing is marketing that employs the use of unethical (and sometimes, but not always, illegal) strategies to promote online business. In contrast to ethical “white hat” strategies, black hat strategies use deception and manipulation to accomplish their objectives. 

What Black Hat Amazon Consultants Offer:

Many consultants offering black hat services are hiding in plain sight on Facebook Groups. One Facebook group with 1,800 members called “Amazon FBA Advanced Marketing” is run by Trista Lee based in Changsha, China. The group says its mission “is to solve seller’s problem with the most advanced methods.”

Every few weeks, Lee advertised new services that she offers sellers, along with a Google Doc with a price list, according to an NBC News review of the document. In August, Lee posted an announcement that she is now offering buyer reviews for $15 to $18 per review and advertising reports on any competitors’ business, which is information not available to third-party sellers through legitimate means. In July, she announced a new offer to reinstate accounts within three to seven days. In May she told the group she can remove negative reviews with a 40 percent success rate.

“Can amazon detect such outside interference?” a seller wrote in a comment, “This could compromise your account.”

Lee replied, “We will operate with bypassing Amazon and your store, so it's safe”

In a Google Doc called “AMZMarketing” Lee includes an offer to buy internal Amazon sales reports on any seller for $130. As well as another service to increase a product’s number of five-star reviews costs $20 a review. For $70 to $140, a seller can pay Lee to vote down negative reviews to disappear from the first page, according to the document.

On Amazon, the use of Black Hat marketing is completely prohibited and will not only lead to a permanent ban from the site but as we have seen previously, Amazons legal department has no problem prosecuting people who have broken the law in any way.  

Source: Read the full article on NBCnews.com