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Published October 2023
EU Store
Transparency Report
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Introduction
Robust proactive controls
Innovative tools
Automated and expert content moderation
Notices and regulatory contacts
Complaint and dispute resolution
Holding bad actors accountable
Collaborating across partners and industry
Conclusion
Table of contents
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Introduction
Nearly three decades ago, Amazon set out to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where
people can discover and purchase the widest possible selection of safe and authentic goods. As part of
that mission, we obsess over earning and maintaining trust by ensuring that we provide a trustworthy
shopping experience. We believe that customer trust is dicult to earn and easy to lose. We invest
heavily in people and technology to protect customers, selling partners, brands, and advertisers from
any form of fraud or abuse.
This is the rst of the Amazon EU Store bi-annual Transparency Reports that will also cover
requirements as part of the EU Digital Services Act (DSA). This report sets out how Amazon has
invested in ensuring a trustworthy shopping experience and continues to raise the bar in keeping our
EU store safe for customers, selling partners, brands, and advertisers and includes data from January
through June of 2023.
Globally in 2022, we invested more than $1.2 billion and employed over 15,000
people—including machine learning scientists, software developers, and expert
investigators—dedicated to protecting customers, brands, selling partners, and our
store from counterfeit, fraud, and other forms of abuse.
Investments in people and technology
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We are proud of the progress we have made in preventing content that is illegal or violates our terms
and conditions from being available in our store. This has required signicant resources, innovation by
Amazon, and partnerships that we have built with rights owners, government agencies, law enforcement,
IP organisations, and many others. We have established best practices that can be applied across
the retail industry globally—in our proactive controls, our innovative tools, and for how the private
and public sector can work together to provide consumers, small businesses, and selling partners a
trustworthy shopping experience. While we believe we have made a great deal of progress, we continue
to invest in improving our shopping and selling experience. We also believe that the industry still has a
long way to go. Amazon continues to be committed to investing, innovating, and being a great partner.
Founded in 1994, Amazon started as a retailer for books. In 2001, Amazon opened its store to third-
party sellers. We opened our rst store in the European Union (EU) in 1998, in Germany. Over the
last 25 years, we’ve contributed to the growth of local communities and created jobs and economic
opportunities in most of the EU Member States and in all kinds of locations, from isolated rural and
neglected post-industrial areas to city centres and campuses. Today, Amazon operates stores in Germany,
Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, and Belgium, and we employ people across many
other EU Member States. We directly employ more than 150,000 people in permanent roles across 21
EU Member States, including more than 35,000 people in professional functions. We have corporate
oces in approximately 50 European cities, including 11 cities in Germany, ve in France, ve in Italy, and
two in Spain. We’ve also invested in 15 research and development centres in nine Member States, and
we operate more than 250 logistics centres across the EU. These resources help to service an estimated
181,368,208 average monthly users across the EU.
Average monthly active users
Member state country Average monthly active users
Austria 5,698,882
Belgium 2,781,420
Bulgaria 82,082
Croatia 143,992
Cyprus 76,504
Czech Republic 167,353
Denmark 269,845
Estonia 63,989
Finland 180,653
France 34,617,763
Germany 60,390,505
Greece 171,397
Hungary 116,326
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Ireland 1,802,267
Italy 38 ,121,014
Latvia 61,579
Lithuania 69,259
Luxembourg 408,565
Malta 76,491
Netherlands 4,589,643
Poland 2,452,715
Portugal 1,536,009
Romania 140,609
Slovakia 51,728
Slovenia 163,706
Spain 25,101, 320
Sweden 2,032,592
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Robust proactive controls
Our voluntary controls use advanced machine learning techniques and automation to monitor dierent
aspects of our store for potentially fraudulent, infringing, inauthentic, non-compliant or unsafe products
or content to maintain a trustworthy shopping experience. Our automated detection tools operate
continuously throughout every step of selling in our store, starting from when a prospective seller begins
their registration process to listing or updating a product, changing key account information, receiving a
funds disbursement, and more. In most cases, bad actors are stopped from even creating an account or
listing a single product for sale, and prohibited content is stopped before a customer ever sees it.
Our robust seller verication coupled with our eorts to hold bad actors accountable
are working. The number of bad actor attempts to create new selling accounts
decreased from 6 million attempts in 2020, to 2.5 million attempts in 2021, to
800,000 attempts in 2022.
Robust, upfront vetting
Seller verication
Amazon uses advanced technology and expert human reviewers to verify the identities of potential
sellers. Prospective sellers are required to provide a variety of information, such as government-issued
photo IDs, taxpayer details, and banking information. In addition to verifying these, Amazon’s systems
also analyse numerous data points including behaviour signals to detect and prevent risks, including
connections to previously detected bad actors. To ensure authenticity of the individual identity, we also
employ live verication methods, like video-based verication or in-person appointments, ensuring that
it’s straightforward for honest small businesses to start selling while making it challenging for malicious
actors to create new selling accounts..
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Product safety and compliance
Our content moderation systems aimed at product compliance include controls that function through
automated rules to identify and remove non-compliant products. We employ thousands of keyword-
based algorithms and machine learning models that are continuously run against the EU store’s product
catalogue, considering linguistic dierences and local compliance requirements by EU storefront location,
to identify potential policy violations. These controls aim to prevent non-compliant products from being
listed or ag them for Amazon’s expert investigators so listings can be stopped if compliance issues are
found or additional information is needed from sellers.
Automated brand protections
Amazon’s Intellectual Property Policy prohibits listings that violate rights owners’ intellectual property
rights. Amazon Brand Registry, a free service launched in 2017, enables brands to more eectively
protect their intellectual property, whether or not they sell on Amazon. Through Brand Registry, brands
can share IP and product data, which Amazon uses to prevent potential infringements. The purpose of
these automated brand protections is to detect content that likely infringes the intellectual property
rights of brands and other rights owners. For example, our brand protection tools use advanced machine
learning to scan keywords, text, and logos which are identical or similar to registered trademarks or
copyrighted work, in order to prevent attempted listing of counterfeit or infringing products.
Globally, Amazon’s automated technology scans over 8 billion daily attempted
changes to product detail pages for signs of potential abuse.
Continuous monitoring
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Advertising
We proactively detect and remove advertising content that violates our Ad Policies, which are designed to
maintain a high customer experience bar for ads on the store. We require all advertising content to comply
with all applicable laws, rules, and regulations; to be appropriate for a general audience, and honest about
the products or services that ad promotes. For example, we prohibit deceptive, misleading or oensive
ads, as well as certain sexual, violent or oensive content.
We invest heavily in people and technology to protect customers, brands, advertisers, and the EU store
from fraud and other forms of abuse. Amazon deploys a number of measures to ensure compliance
with our Ad Policies and detect infringing ads, including through automated moderation tools that
check millions of ads and their visible ad elements per day worldwide (including advertiser-supplied
images, product listing titles and images, and product descriptions). For example, we implement deny
lists on certain products that block all ads for customers who search for specic query terms e.g. “guns”.
Ad Policies also block specic listings for being viable for advertising. To complement our automated
measures, expert teams also conduct human reviews of ads to identify any potential non-compliance and
apply the learnings as feedback to continually improve our automated moderation tools.
Trustworthy reviews
Our moderation processes for community content include machine learning models that detect content
that violates our Community Guidelines and prevent it from being published. We strictly prohibit fake
reviews that intentionally mislead customers by providing information that is not impartial, authentic,
or intended for that product or service. We invest signicant resources to proactively stop fake reviews.
This includes machine learning models that detect risk, including relationships between accounts, sign-in
activity, review history, and other indications of unusual behaviour, as well as expert investigators that use
sophisticated fraud-detection tools to analyse and prevent fake reviews from ever appearing in our store.
Our machine learning models analyse millions of reviews each week using thousands of data points to
detect risk. The review ranking algorithm considers signals from Amazon’s fraud-detection tools related
to the authenticity of a review. When we strongly suspect that a review is inauthentic, we suppress the
review completely, so it is not displayed in the Amazon EU store.
Oensive and controversial products
Amazon prohibits the sale of products and books that promote, incite, or glorify hatred, violence, racial,
sexual, or religious discrimination or promote organisations with such views; contain pornography, glorify
rape or paedophilia or promote the abuse or sexual exploitation of children; or graphically portray violence
or victims of violence, and advocate terrorism; among other material deemed inappropriate or oensive.
We leverage machine learning and automation to lter listing submissions that we suspect of potential
policy violation, and then our content moderation teams manually review these suspect listings. We use
machine learning and manual review to lter potentially policy-violating listings.
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Voluntary content moderation
In the rst half of 2023, we took 274MM actions on our own initiative, which include actions taken
through the proactive content moderation tools we have built to remove content from our EU store, as
well as those related to policy violations or other types of non-illegal content.
Number of actions taken on our own initiative by type of restriction
Type of restriction # of Actions
Remove content 84.2MM
Disable access to content 133.6MM
Suspend monetary payments 313K
Partially suspend provision of the service 51.5MM
Totally suspend provision of the service 385K
Suspend the account 4.2MM
Make another restriction 258K
All others 0
Number of actions taken on our own initiative by type of content
Related to # of Actions
Product 219.8MM
Multimedia (including Image, Text, and Video) 54.6MM
All others 0
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Our teams are constantly innovating
on behalf of customers, brands and selling partners to create a safe
and trustworthy shopping experience. This includes building tools that we provide to brands and selling
partners to help them comply with applicable laws and our terms and conditions and also empower
them to provide us with feedback and information that we use to improve our proactive controls and
automated content moderation.
Business and educational tools for selling partners
We have straightforward policies and a suite of powerful tools available for sellers to ensure their
products are oered in accordance with applicable laws. Entrepreneurs and small businesses can use
these policies as a guide to get started in our store and list their rst products after they undergo our
seller verication process.
When we innovate to improve the experience of selling on Amazon, we start by listening to our selling
partners. Our selling partner insights programmes seek feedback on our features and processes by
polling selling partners when they log in to their selling accounts, sharing ad-hoc surveys, and hosting
interactive workshops with our teams. Selling partners can contact us in a variety of ways, including by
email, phone, and chat, and we also analyse selling partner contacts to detect and x the drivers of these
issues and improve our help content and processes.
Our new tools and services help selling partners launch new products, optimise listings, and expand their
businesses globally. We continue to keep selling partners informed, with tips on how to optimise their
Amazon selling experience, as well as updates on new regulatory requirements and policies, in regular
news announcements via Seller Central, seller forums, newsletters, and our seller app.
Amazon EU store’s Intellectual Property Policy provides clear and practical information to sellers about
intellectual property rights and common intellectual property concerns that might arise when selling in
Amazon’s store, including regarding the enforcement of those rights. Amazon has no tolerance for bad
actors that are attempting to intentionally abuse or circumvent these policies, but we also recognise that
honest, well-intending sellers share Amazon’s mission to protect consumers while respecting the IP
rights of others, but some may unknowingly list a non-compliant or prohibited product because they are
unaware of an applicable legal requirement or Amazon policy.
Innovative tools
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O
ur Seller University helps European selling partners learn and master Amazon’s tools and grow their
businesses by offering courses on hundreds of topics, including how to start selling on Amazon, how
Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) works, and advertising tips for brand owners.
The Amazon EU store also prompts sellers to provide relevant product safety and compliance materials,
including product compliance warnings and markings on product pages and high-quality six-sided
images of their products and packaging. Often and where available, we leverage APIs and public
resources to help make compliance easy and reliable. For example, sellers can display energy efficiency
labelling by simply giving us their European Product Registry for Energy Labelling ID information.
Brand protection tools
Amazon creates powerful tools for rights owners to protect their brands by partnering with us. We
work with a large and ever-growing number of brands, and because they know their products best,
we work together so we can be even more effective in proactively stopping counterfeit, fraud, and
other forms of abuse.
We launched Amazon Brand Registry, a free service for brands, whether they sell in our store or not.
The service provides brands the ability to better manage and grow their brand with Amazon, and
protect their brand and intellectual property rights. Through the Report a Violation tool, brand owners
can more easily search for, identify, and report infringements and subsequently track their
submissions within the dedicated Submission History dashboard. They also get access to many other
brand protection and brand building features.
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Project Zero combines Amazon’s advanced technology with the sophisticated
knowledge that brands have of their own intellectual property and how best to detect
counterfeits of their brands. This happens through our powerful brand protection
tools, including automated protections, product serialisation capabilities, and the
unprecedented ability we give brands in Project Zero to directly remove counterfeit
listings from our store.
Project Zero
For small businesses that are just getting started and are looking for help in obtaining and protecting
their intellectual property, our IP Accelerator programme connects these businesses with a vetted
network of trusted IP law rms in 39 dierent countries and 13 dierent languages, oering high-
quality, trusted trademark registration services at pre-negotiated competitive rates for these small
businesses.
We also prevent counterfeits from reaching customers through Transparency, a product serialisation
service that uses codes unique to every individual manufactured unit of a product to identify those
individual units. These codes can be scanned throughout the supply chain and by customers to verify
authenticity using the Amazon Shopping App or Transparency App, regardless of where the products
were purchased. Amazon veries these codes to ensure that only authentic units are shipped to
customers, virtually eliminating counterfeits for these products.
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Amazon employs machine learning scientists, data analysts, software developers, and expert
investigators dedicated to protecting customers, brands, selling partners, and our store from illegal
content, including counterfeit, fraud, and other forms of abuse. These employees help us drive both
automated and expert manual content moderation.
Automated and expert
content moderation
Leveraging automation to drive scaled impact
Our automated tools help us scale our protections and take action more quickly. They help us operate
at scale to prevent bad actors from registering an account, and to detect and remove listings or other
content that violate our policies or the law. These automated tools range from text-based algorithms
that identify specic keywords to sophisticated image recognition and machine learning models. Once
our tools have identied potentially infringing or illegal content, we use a mixture of automated tools and
expert investigators to determine the appropriate enforcement action.
When our automated tools identify prohibited content with a high degree of condence, they
automatically take enforcement action. We use the data and learnings gathered from these technologies
and valid notices of infringement or illegal content to innovate and improve our controls.
In the rst half of 2023, 73MM of our voluntary actions were fully automated. 97% of our fully automated
voluntary actions were accurate.
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Safeguards applied to automation
To safeguard against potential errors made by our automated tools, we implement processes to ensure
that we have a high condence rate that our automated tools operate as intended and to minimise
mistakes. We do this by ensuring our automated tools meet a high bar of accuracy before they are
launched by testing the provision of the control, and by continuously auditing our automated tools
after they launch and removing from use automation that does not maintain a suciently high level
of accuracy. We also constantly improve our automated tools by training them using new information,
including internal learnings and developments (including outcomes of expert manual decisions) and
external risk signals, so they can learn and constantly get better at proactively identifying and blocking
non-compliant products automatically.
Expert manual reviews
All Amazon sta, including sta dedicated to content moderation, are required to meet Amazon’s
Leadership Principles. The Leadership Principles are a set of guidelines that Amazon employees use
every day to solve problems, evaluate trade-os, and make decisions. There are 16 in total, and they
are the framework of how we evaluate potential candidates for jobs and set the expectations of
performance across Amazon. In addition, the level of qualication and expertise our content moderators
have is diverse and varies depending on their specic job role. Most of our content moderators have a
bachelor’s degree in relevant elds of study, including computer science, information technology, data
science, information security, nance, foreign studies, intellectual property, and risk management. All
sta dedicated to content moderation have demonstrated experience performing research on a variety
of topics, including fraud, abuse, trust, and risk; and have the ability to investigate complex and highly
technical problems, and perform root cause analysis.
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Linguistic expertise and training
Although most of our expert investigators are able to make content moderation decisions without
specic linguistic expertise, we do have investigator teams with working prociency in the national
language of the Amazon EU store that they support, specically German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch,
Polish, and Swedish, in addition to English. Those with prociency in national EU store languages assist
with implementing language-based automated controls and machine-translation technology, dening
local store requirements and policies, auditing corresponding decisions, and interacting with Member
State authorities.
Our expert investigators dedicated to content moderation, including the administration of Amazon’s
notice and action mechanisms, complaints and appeals procedures, are trained to identify illegal content
and content that infringes our terms and conditions. Our investigators receive: an exhaustive onboarding
process to familiarise themselves with the underlying policies and standardised operating procedures,
which must be completed before they are able to take their own moderation decisions; robust continued
on-the-job training and periodical knowledge tests, including on any new tools or processes; and when
needed, support from subject matter coaches and escalation paths to team managers. This includes
training in the relevant subject matter to better protect our customers and, additionally, regular training
on our company’s policies, terms and conditions, and their specic area of expertise, whether that’s
product safety and compliance, IP and brand protection, controversial content, or misleading customer
reviews. For example, investigators dedicated to evaluating IP infringement notices receive training
and support in accurately identifying dierent types of infringing listing content, including trademarks,
copyright, design and patents. Similarly, investigators creating product listing rules have detailed
knowledge of Amazon’s catalogue and are trained to accurately develop and apply product listing rules.
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Through the tools we have built, selling partners, brands, and customers can submit notices that alert
Amazon when they think they have found illegal content in our store. When we receive a notice, we take
action quickly to investigate and if accurate, remove content from our store.
Notices and regulatory
contacts
Article 16 notices
In the rst half of 2023, our reporting mechanisms and tools received 417,836 notices. We resolved
283,220 notices through automated processes.
We took 810,170 actions on valid notices. Our terms and conditions prohibit any illegal content being
oered for sale and so all of our actions are taken because the information or content violated both our
policies and applicable law. The median time to take action on a notice and conrm our actions with the
submitter was less than one day.
Number of Article 16 notices received by type
Related to # of Notices
Image 27,980
Product 389,856
All others 0
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Anti-abuse measures
We take the notices and reports we receive from users seriously. Misuse of our systems can negatively
impact customers and sellers, and we have measures in place to identify and take action when these
systems are abused. We investigate and take action against submitters who we suspect or have been
found to submit false reports. In the rst half of 2023, we took enforcement action against 1,841 users
of our service for repeatedly submitting unfounded notices and complaints.
Regulatory contacts
If there is an instance where a bad actor or content has evaded our proactive controls or notice systems
and we receive a contact from a regulator, we move quickly to respond and resolve the issue. In the
rst half of 2023, we received 1,081 contacts from EU Member States’ authorities. The median time
to inform an authority we received their contact was less than one day, and the median time to resolve
the issue they surfaced was two days. Of those contacts, 1,081 were related to product and we had no
contacts related to App, Audio, Image, Synthetic Media, Text, Video, or Other.
Regulatory contacts received by EU Member State
Member state country # of Contacts
Austria 9
Belgium 6
France 56
Germany 754
Ireland 82
Italy 24
Luxembourg 18
Netherlands 4
Poland 6
Spain 102
Sweden 20
All others 0
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When we identify and remove a non-compliant or unsafe product oer or suspend a seller, advertiser,
or rights owner due to a policy violation, we provide clear and actionable communications. We describe
the policy violation that led to the enforcement action, and also provide additional information about
Amazon’s policies and compliance resources that can help users be compliant in the future. We have a
process to remediate policy violations, appeal enforcements, or dispute enforcements and ask Amazon
to re-examine decisions.
Complaint and dispute
resolution
Complaint resolution
In the rst half of 2023, we received 156,369 complaints. 2,868 complaints were because the user
disagreed with our decision not to take action on a notice of alleged illegal content. 153,501 complaints
were because they disagreed with the specic action we took in response to the user uploaded content.
Of the 810,170 actions we took on valid notices we received, we later reversed 41,167 of our original
decisions due to complaints. Our median time to resolve a complaint was one day.
Out-of-court disputes
If sellers remain dissatised with an Amazon decision after reaching out to our support teams, they can
seek resolution for most disputes through an independent mediation process, facilitated by the Centre for
Eective Dispute Resolution. This redress mechanism enhances Amazon’s ability to appropriately protect
sellers’ interests and expression. We also have organised teams dedicated to ensuring that we hear and
address selling partner pain points.
In the rst half of 2023, EU selling partners submitted three out-of-court disputes. In these three
mediations, the independent mediator issued three settlement outcomes favourable to Amazon and
there were no recommendations to implement. The median time for a mediator to complete settlement
procedures was 56 days, which is the time from when the mediator noties Amazon of the dispute to
when the mediator shares their recommendation with us.
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In partnership with brands and law enforcement, we have been able to hold more bad actors accountable
through civil litigation and criminal referrals to law enforcement organisations—working to stop them
from abusing our and other retailers’ stores across the industry in the future. Our eorts to identify and
help dismantle counterfeit organisations, fake reviews brokers, and other fraudsters are still early but are
working. We are proud of our eorts so far and how they have helped ensure that far more criminals are
held accountable, but we also believe that there is far more for industry and government to do in holding
bad actors accountable.
We also know honest users sometimes make mistakes. However, we have no tolerance for intentional and
repeated abuse of our systems and we take necessary action to stop abuse in our store. In the rst half of
2023, Amazon took enforcement action against 15,774 users of our service for publishing illegal content.
We also responded to 8,863 legal requests from EU Member States’ authorities for information about
users of our service in the legally mandated time-frames.
Legal requests from EU Member States’ authorities
Holding bad actors
accountable
Member state country # of Requests
Belgium 86
France 817
Germany 4,513
Italy 1,101
Luxembourg 9
Netherlands 68
Poland 38
Spain 2,206
Sweden 25
All others 0
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Disrupting counterfeit networks across the globe
We continue to work with brands and law enforcement to hold more counterfeiters accountable, to deter
these criminals from abusing our store, and to stop them from selling counterfeits anywhere. Amazon’s
Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) works with brands, customs agencies, and law enforcement to track down
counterfeiters, shut down bad actors’ accounts, seize counterfeit inventory, and prosecute those involved.
CCU has disrupted counterfeiters and their networks through civil suits, joint enforcement actions, and
seizures with law enforcement worldwide. When Amazon identies an issue, we act quickly to protect
customers, brands, and our store, including removing the problematic content or listing and, where
appropriate, blocking accounts, withholding funds, quarantining physical inventory, or referring bad actors
to law enforcement.
In 2022, Amazon’s CCU sued or referred for criminal investigation over 1,300 counterfeiters globally. We
also work to nd the factories and the warehouses where these goods are created or stored, and get
them shut down. In 2022, we identied, seized, and appropriately disposed of over 6 million counterfeits,
preventing them from being resold anywhere in the supply chain.
German law enforcement acted on intelligence from Amazon against nine
suspected members of a German-based counterfeit printer ink and toner ring
that attempted to deceive customers by selling fake toner cartridges that were
marketed as genuine products.
Amazon and Salvatore Ferragamo jointly led two lawsuits against four individuals
(the “defendants”) and three entities for counterfeiting Ferragamo’s products. The
defendants attempted to oer the infringing products in Amazon’s store, violating
Amazon’s policies, Ferragamo’s intellectual property rights, and the law.
Amazon has already led multiple litigations against fake review brokers across the
EU Member states. In Germany, for example, this litigation led to the fake review
brokers 100 Rabatt and Nice Rebate being shut down.
Holding bad actors accountable in the EU
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Taking action against fake reviews brokers
Our goal is to ensure that every review in Amazon’s store is trustworthy and reects customers’ actual
experiences. For that reason, Amazon welcomes authentic reviews—whether positive or negative—but
strictly prohibits fake reviews that intentionally mislead customers by providing information that is not
impartial, authentic, or intended for that product or service. Amazon has been pursuing legal actions
against fake reviews brokers to combat the root cause of fake reviews in the retail industry. Amazon has
won dozens of injunctions, particularly in Europe, resulting in several paid-review companies being shut
down and halting their activities.
In 2023, Amazon has already led multiple litigations across Europe, including in Germany, Spain, Poland,
Austria, and France. Our legal actions globally are driving positive results as we have shut down some of
the largest global brokers, including Matronex and Climbazon. By taking such action, Amazon targets
the source of the problem. Because fake review brokers use third-party services like social media and
encrypted third-party messaging services to facilitate their illicit schemes, Amazon investigates and
regularly reports abusive groups, deceptive inuencers, and other bad actors to these third parties social
media and message services.
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Collaborating across partners
and industry
We know that we can be more eective by working together across the private and public sector.
We regularly engage with other interested parties from industry participants, consumer protection
organisations, governments and regulators, academia, and others that share our desire to work
collaboratively to protect consumers and small businesses. We have launched private sector information-
sharing agreements and participated in voluntary product safety pledges with governments all over
the world, and continue to seek out other opportunities to partner more closely with other industry
members and governments where it can drive positive, substantive impact.
Private sector information-sharing
We believe that there should be more private sector information-sharing. As we laid out in our 2021
blueprint for stopping counterfeiters and our 2023 blueprint for stopping fake reviews, we think it’s
critical that private and public sector partnership includes greater sharing of information.
Our membership in the Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange, which is an industry collaboration that started
in the US, is designed to make it more dicult for counterfeiters to move among dierent stores, and
safer for consumers to shop anywhere they choose. We are eager to see the same or similar eorts
across the globe, so we can all use this type of information in our ongoing eorts to detect and address
counterfeiting, and we look forward to leveraging jurisdiction and region-specic best practices here
in the EU, such as those laid out in the IP Toolbox against Counterfeiting and the framework of the EU
Memorandum of Understanding, to enable conversations and drive European industry-wide data-
sharing on counterfeiters. Similarly, our recent announcement of a global Coalition for Trusted Reviews
is an industry collaboration across the US, EU, and other countries to, among other things, share
information on how fraudsters operate so we can make even greater progress in decreasing fraudulent
reviews.
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Protecting our borders
Amazon also wants to see greater information-sharing to stop counterfeits at the borders. We continue
to expand our work with customs agencies to mutually exchange information on counterfeit activity. We
can aid customs agencies in their detection, search and seizure eorts, and strengthen law enforcement’s
ability to dismantle criminal networks behind these illicit goods. Customs agencies can work with us
to not only stop the shipments they seize, but to also help freeze other assets and inventory from
counterfeiters that we may know about.
Partnering with law enforcement
In addition to the eorts mentioned earlier on stopping counterfeiters and fake reviews brokers where
Amazon partners closely with law enforcement, Amazon also shares information on potential suspicious
customer transactions and relevant data points with law enforcement agencies across Europe, such as
customer information in accordance with the Explosive Precursor Regulation. For this purpose, Amazon
invests signicant eorts into identifying and reporting transactions that may be suspicious when
combined with information that law enforcement may have. Amazon has classied several hundred
thousand products for which transactions are monitored, and complex combination purchases are
agged for potentially being suspicious. All of the results are reviewed by risk managers, to ensure
correct reporting considering the impact an incorrect report might have on our customers and on the
general public. Our eorts in working with the authorities and law enforcement agencies is underlined
by the fact that we are actively participating in the EU Standing Committee on Precursors, the German
Arbeitskreis on Explosive Precursors, and are in close contact with the relevant national contact points. In
light of this participation, we have contributed to the Guidance Documents released by the Commission
on the identication and reporting of suspicious precursors.
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Partnering with law enforcement
Product safety pledges
Amazon has signed four product safety pledges across the world in the EU, Australia, Japan, and
Canada. Each pledge commits signatories to meet certain standards like actioning on recalled product
notications from governments eciently or providing data to regulatory partners to help inform and
improve their processes and compliance laws. As a founding signatory of the EU Product Safety Pledge
in 2018, Amazon was pleased to continue our cooperation with the European Commission by signing
an updated agreement—Product Safety Pledge+ in March 2023, which will go into eect in December.
The original 2018 Product Safety Pledge was the rst of its kind, demonstrating the value of bringing
together key stakeholders and taking a pragmatic approach with clear benets for consumers.
The new Pledge+ features commitments beyond what is established in EU safety legislation,
strengthening cooperation and dialogue between signatories and authorities to protect consumers. In
addition, the pledge has served as the backdrop to a pilot project between consumer groups and the
pledge’s signatories, meant to facilitate the exchange of information and timely coordinated action for
the takedown of unsafe products.
Amazon’s Director of EU Public Policy, James Waterworth (far left), with representatives from other companies at the signing
ceremony for the European Commission’s ‘Product Safety Pledge+’
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Amazon is known for its customer obsession, and an essential part of that is earning and maintaining our
customers’ and selling partners’ trust. Inherent to that – we do not sacrice customer safety or long-term
customer trust for short-term gain. It is the reason we invest far above and beyond our legal obligations
to ensure a trustworthy shopping and selling experience.
We recognise that our job of protecting our customers, brands, and selling partners is never done—in
this area, as with the rest of Amazon, we always perceive that it is Day 1 and that we must continue to
innovate and get even better than where we are today.
In addition to our robust and proactive controls, we are continuously creating new tools and advancing
our technology to detect bad actors and illegal content and stop it from being found in our store. We
head o fraud, counterfeiting, and inappropriate content before customers ever see it our store. In
cases where we have missed something and it is reported to us, we swiftly remove the content, hold
bad actors accountable, and use such incidents to inform our prevention and monitoring eorts going
forward.
We will continue to innovate and join forces with industry and governments to improve outcomes for
consumers. We will continue to post updates to our ongoing eorts via this report every six months,
including those areas required for reporting by the DSA.
Conclusion
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