I know why Discourseās default filters frown upon any use of āchĆnkā in a post, but it would appear to me that the blanking here is inconducive to furthering conversation.
Agreed. I will fix.
Edit fixed
Confirmed:
Chink in the armor
People, People, People - send that man every blue cookie ya can scrounge! 
In what way?
This is not clear to me. Evidence is requested.
I dispute this. Well compensated CEOās still embezzle. With the exception of a handful of bad actors, the vast majority of Amazonās overseas employees do not take bribes. Iām not saying that need doesnāt motivate illegal action, but that doesnāt mean the Amazon employees in question acted out of desperation. I am not aware of any information that the Amazon employees taking bribes needed the money to feed their families any more than Ed engaged in his illegal actions out of need. Some people are willing to take or give bribes where others are not.
Again, evidence is requested.
What security precautions do you feel were expected of Amazon but not taken that could have prevented this kind of information leak? How to grant people access to information they need to do their jobs while still keeping it secure against the possibility of a willful leak perpetrated by an employee is a problem every organization deals with, from credit bureaus to banks to the CIA. It is exceedingly difficult to stop people with legitimate access to information from disseminating it if they want to.
I definitely agree with this.
Nail, meet hammer.
Itās very simple.
Iāve played video games with better security set up. There were GMs who could review griefing tickets and issue a ban if the review showed the player was griefing. The tickets were randomly assigned and they could ONLY view tickets assigned to them and take action on them. They also could not reverse another GMās decision. Only the senior level people were allowed to view everything and reverse a lower level GMās decision.
I THOUGHT that Amazonās system was set up the same way, where a given seller performance employee would be randomly assigned cases and they could only act or view the cases they were randomly assigned. Apparently they had full access to everything and could even reverse another seller performance employeeās decision. That to me is gross negligence.
Itās very simple, if you have low level employees you want to keep their duties basic and give them minimal access or control over anything. Only allowing them access to random cases is one of the top ways to avoid any kind of issues as in order to do something malicious you generally need the ability to affect a specific seller account. (Not counting a disgruntled employee who suspends a bunch of random accounts to cause problems on their way out, which is easily found out and fixed). Itās insanity to think that a seller performance employee could look up an account that they were NOT assigned a case on and take action on it.
Amazon doesnāt even know how itās system is set up at this point.
Itās not insanity, and there are good reasons to have something like this in place. Many organizations and corporations have a similar system simply because no employee works 24/7 (hospitals, school systems, banks, workplaces where access is restricted to on-site only, etc).
The Amazon issue is that there were no checks-and-balances for actions taken, plus a quota system that emphasizes speed and quantity over quality.
Plenty of Amazon accounts are unsuspended or reactivated without proper POAs and other documentation due to human error, not because of a bribed employee. In a system with little oversight or capacity to verify each reactivation, thereās no way to catch these bad actions, whether they are intentional or not.
These consultants exploited these chinks in the system for their own enrichment and benefit. Every āmiracleā reactivation was a notch on their brag belt and part of subsequent marketing and boasting.
It is insanity, no seller calls to chooses a seller performance employee to handle their case. The system randomly assigns your case to an employee every time you submit a response to the case. Only the employee currently assigned to the most recent submission should have access to the case and that seller account. Itās not like a company where sales reps need to be able to look up any account because a customer could potentially call any sales rep instead of just their assigned one if their assigned one is busy.
Thereās no reason for a low level seller performance employee to be looking up random seller accounts that they havenāt been assigned to other than for some kind of wrongdoing.
Just adding this for documentation.
From Cynthia Stine at eGrowth Partners
From the justice.gov story --āāItās almost as if you and the others treated Amazon as an evil empire subject to your attackā¦.ā
Almost makes them appear to be the good guys in a perverse way.
Amazon? Evil empire? Sounds pretty reasonableā¦ 
Hey, Iām the first to call out Amazon assholery, ineptitude, and illogicāall of which are wrong and dangerousābut none of that justifies what these folks did, not only to specific Sellers but also all 3P Sellers, with their black hat actions.
These criminals tried to set themselves up as Robin Hoods to manipulate others into not only enriching them, but also smiling and feeling righteous while doing it.
Classic grift. Like televangelists.
The ālisten to sellersā part is the best advice for Amazon. Take sellers with good metrics who have been around forever and havenāt changed their store name (or whatever other basis of likely-trust you want to establish). Give them one complaint a year that will be addressed by competent people at Amazon empowered to act (if such people exist). If the complaint gets rejected, too bad, youāre no worse off than before. If it gets listened to, then you get the right to antoher complaint.
We all know things the bots canāt pick up on. Give us a chance to explain where weāre getting reamed, and look at the data we provide.
The worst advice here is to clean house of bad internal actors. The incentives are too high, both for sellers and employees, and in a system this large, youāll have bad actors. Period. But you can change the incentives: donāt give employees metric-driven goals that define whether or not they keep their jobs then turn on the Plausible Deniability engine and close your eyes then act shocked when someone crosses the line; donāt base sales on seller performance metrics that require sellers to either act like or lose out to black hats. Donāt onboard sellers at such a rate that you canāt vet them properly. Care, donāt say you care. These things work better than whack-a-moling corporate moles.
ā¦just highlighting these awesome insights!
That last one is the best one. Believe me.
Itās like hiring the mafia to do something for you, then refusing to pay them.
Not sure Iād call that a victim, more like dumb co-conspirator.
Report from the department of subterfuge and intelligence-gathering:
Ed thinks that he can run a 2nd āASGTGā event in the summer!
While I would not want anyone to fill out the anonymous survey with misleading information, I think that the āsurveyā is a āpush pollā designed to simply promote the event, which if it was anything like the one I infiltrated some time ago, focuses on suspension, getting un-suspended, and doing stupid stuff that is sure to get you suspended in ever more creative ways in hope of evading Amazonās wrath.
And if anyone wants to infiltrate as I did, you need to bring a large supply of very strong mints to allow you to tolerate sitting in a closed room full of āAmazon Millionairesā who clearly do not bathe often enough.