Amazon It presents a broader argument about fraud in online commerce. The threat is no longer limited to counterfeit handbags, counterfeit electronics, and trademark misuse. It now extends to scams, fake reviews, product safety, organized retail crime, and seller manipulation.
In the beginning “Trustworthy Shopping Experience” report, Amazon said it is using artificial intelligence (AI), stricter seller screenings, and broader enforcement efforts to stop many of those threats before they reach shoppers or merchants.
The report represents a shift from Amazon’s previous brand protection reports, which focused largely on counterfeit products and intellectual property. The new version retains these themes but expands the framework to include what Amazon describes as four connected priorities: proactive controls, tools that anticipate risk, action against fraudsters, and consumer education.
Claire O’DonnellAmazon’s vice president of partner trust selling and store integrity said the broader framework better reflects how the company actually thinks about the issue.
“The approach we’ve taken in the report this year for the first time is this much broader view of our trust and safety efforts,” O’Donnell told PYMNTS. “A key cornerstone…is how we become more proactive” so Amazon can identify problems with sellers or products early and prevent them from reaching customers.
This payment begins before many sellers start working on the platform. Amazon said all new sellers must complete a verification process designed to make it easier for legitimate businesses to join while making it harder for scammers to get in. The company said it verifies identity, merchant links and payment flows, then continues to monitor sellers over time.
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The goal is to add protection without burdening honest traders, O’Donnell said.
“Our goal is for these verification processes to be seamless for legitimate selling partners, but very difficult for bad actors to manipulate,” she said. “Are you a real person? Are you connected to a real business? Is money flowing into this real business?”
Artificial intelligence comes to the rescue
Artificial intelligence is playing a larger role in this effort. Amazon said its systems scan billions of product page change attempts every day, while multimedia tools analyze text, images, seller behavior and supply chain patterns for signs of abuse. The company also said its Omniscan machine learning system has created image sets for more than 12 million products to help verify required safety information before listings are published in many markets.
The company also emphasizes prediction, not just detection. Amazon said an early warning system that pulls signals from social media and other retailers helped it prevent infringing listings linked to a viral branded product eight days before the brand owner shared its intellectual property with Amazon. The report also pointed out Centrixan artificial intelligence system that Amazon said has improved its ability to identify and remove phishing sites, helping raise successful takedowns of phishing URLs by more than 10%.
For O’Donnell, the message is that these threats increasingly overlap.
“I think that’s absolutely true,” she said when asked if trust and safety now seemed more like one connected problem than a series of separate problems. “We’re just sharing more of an externally interconnected trust and safety strategy.”
Amazon used the report to underscore the extent of its enforcement work. It said its counterfeiting crimes unit has pursued more than 32,000 fraudsters through lawsuits and criminal referrals since 2020 in 14 countries. In 2025 alone, the company said it identified and eliminated more than 15 million counterfeit products worldwide. It also said legal action helped shut down more than 100 websites linked to fake reviews and scams targeting the Amazon store, while its systems blocked hundreds of millions of suspected fake reviews before they appeared online.
Communication with customers
Amazon is also trying to show that trust extends beyond the transaction itself. The company said it directly contacted millions of customers in 2025 to provide them with information about product safety and worked with 34 consumer organizations on 71 safety topics in seven countries. Its Recall and Safety Alerts page is designed to notify affected customers when governments announce recalls and direct them to refund, return, or repair options.
However, O’Donnell said the toughest challenge may be one that no platform can solve alone.
“It’s really organized retail crime,” she said. “It is a coordinated criminal enterprise.”
She said retailers, brands and law enforcement will need to work together to stop networks targeting supply chains, logistics systems and digital storefronts on a large scale.
This may be the central point of Amazon’s new report. Market fraud is no longer just a counterfeiting or seller problem. It’s a broader trust issue, and one that large platforms increasingly believe must be addressed before customers see the threat.
