Amazon seller reveals glimpse of shadow bribery market

In December, online merchant Jack Nekhala got in touch with Amazon.com Inc. with an urgent message.

Nekhala told an Amazon representative that a woman he didn’t know had contacted him with an intriguing offer: She could bribe an Amazon employee to help him retrieve $90,000 in funds that the e-commerce giant had frozen after suspending him over an alleged violation of review policy.

Hoping to ingratiate himself with the company and restart his business, Nekhala offered to provide evidence, including recorded conversations and screenshots, that he said proved Amazon personnel were peddling inside information and influence. The smoking gun, Nekhala told the representative: information about his seller account. Only certain Amazon employees are supposed to have access to such details, but Nekhala had received them from the woman on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app.

Nekhala’s experience, which he documented and shared with Bloomberg, provides a rare glimpse into an international black market that has been a persistent scourge of Amazon’s online store. On one side are sellers looking for a variety of favors: a competitive edge over their rivals, information on how to boost sales, a way to get themselves unsuspended. On the other are middlemen who lurk on message apps like Telegram, WeChat and WhatsApp offering access to people inside Amazon who can get things done for a price.

Typically, such offers surge during key moments on the retail calendar, including Amazon’s Prime Day sale and the holiday shopping season from Black Friday to Christmas.

It’s impossible to determine the scope of the illicit activity, but it’s an open secret among Amazon sellers and consultants, who are frequently approached on social-media platforms and messaging apps. “The message is always the same: ‘I’m going to show you screenshots to prove I have inside access,’” said Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee who runs a seller consulting firm. “It starts with the internal notes. That’s the bait on the hook.”

In 2020, federal prosecutors exposed an international bribery scheme involving Amazon sellers and employees. The ring allegedly extracted about $100 million in unfair advantages by bribing Amazon employees in Asia to help them sell more products and sabotage their competitors. Five people in the U.S. were convicted and received jail terms or probation. Last year, law enforcement officials in India began investigating more than 20 former Amazon employees suspected of accepting bribes from trucking companies in exchange for routes, according to The Times of India.

After Nekhala reported his own experience to Amazon, the representative committed to “do some digging” and to email him instructions on how his evidence could be shared, according to a recording of the conversation. But Nekhala said he never heard back. The employee who leaked his personal information had already been fired for unrelated misconduct, according to Amazon.

“As one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, there’s always the risk of bad actors attempting to exploit, defraud or otherwise scam our business,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in an emailed statement. “On very rare occasions, an employee can be involved in such instances. We invest heavily in this area and have dedicated teams and systems in place to prevent all types of fraud, including by our own employees.”

Amazon didn’t explain why no one got back to Nekhala after the online merchant offered to share his evidence with the company.

Bed Scrunchie

Nekhala invented the Bed Scrunchie, an adjustable elastic band that clips sheets to a mattress. He patented the product and began selling it on Amazon about the time the coronavirus pandemic hit. Online sales boomed and Nekhala said his business exploded. Annual revenue peaked at about $6 million, mostly from sales on Amazon, and the product was featured on ABC’s Good Morning America in 2020.

Then, in November of 2024, Amazon suspended his account for allegedly violating the company’s product review policies. Nekhala for years had been issuing warranty cards that invited customers to register and leave a product review in exchange for a free Bed Scrunchie accessory. Amazon had announced new automated tools designed to ferret out review manipulation and said his marketing tactic violated the guidelines.

The suspension coincided with the busy holiday shopping season, and Nekhala had just borrowed money through an Amazon lending program to stock warehouses with 30,000 Bed Scrunchies, which he planned to sell during Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. Nekhala had also purchased television commercials to drum up interest. The suspension’s timing couldn’t have been worse, Nekhala said.

A few weeks later, Nekhala received a LinkedIn message from a man offering to help him sell his products on Temu. The outreach led to a call with a woman who identified herself as a California-based Chinese immigrant named Jenna.

Over the course of two months, Nekhala participated in four video and phone calls with Jenna lasting a total of almost two hours. During their first interaction, Nekhala explained his Amazon predicament. “Let me see if I can help here,” Jenna said, adding that she also sold bedding products and knew a lot of people. “You have to find the right person.”

On a subsequent video call, Jenna told Nekhala she had gained access to his Amazon records. “We found some guy that works at Amazon and looked into your case,” she said. Jenna put the records up on her screen, but Nekhala had a hard time reading the documents and eventually persuaded her to send them to him. The records summarized why his account was suspended and logged 20 calls Nekhala made to try and reverse the suspension.

At one point, Jenna said she had offered to pay her Amazon contact to get Nekhala’s account reinstated. “I said, ‘Hey I give you money, whatever you ask for.’” But she said her contact had concluded that, based on the account records, the odds of success were too low. So instead, Jenna suggested paying her contact to get back the $90,000 sitting in Nekhala’s account. The contact typically charged 20% but the fee was negotiable, she said.

Nekhala said he didn’t accept the offer. Jenna later said her contact could get Nekhala’s account back online, but only if Nekhala was willing to sell his company at a low price. They eventually lost touch. Nekhala said he never spoke directly with any Amazon employees seeking bribes.

Attempts to contact Jenna using information provided by Nekhala, including texts, voicemails and messages on WeChat, received no reply. Bloomberg was unable to independently verify Jenna’s identity and is withholding the surname she provided to Nekhala.

Amazon has been slimming down its workforce and delegating more tasks to artificial intelligence. As a result, merchants like Nekhala with complicated issues struggle to find a human to help them, and when they do, often get passed from one representative to another, according to sellers and their consultants. That has fueled demand for inside information, said Steven Pope, who runs the online selling consulting business My Amazon Guy. “The temptation has never been greater for sellers because they feel Amazon has abandoned them,” Pope said.

Amazon also has outsourced many marketplace functions to employees in lower-wage countries like India and China. That makes fighting commercial bribery harder, owing to limited law enforcement cooperation between those countries and the U.S., said Henry Pontell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Amazon’s online marketplace is ripe for crime because employees willing to sell information for extra cash know the chances of getting prosecuted are relatively low, he said.

“Even if someone blows the whistle, who is going to do anything about it,” Pontell said. “China in particular is very tough when it comes to U.S. companies seeking help from law enforcement.”

Glasser, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company works with law enforcement as needed if it discovers an employee did something illegal, but he declined to describe how Amazon ferrets out fraudulent activity. “The fact that we don’t provide details on how we prevent fraud does not mean we don’t have extensive methods,” he said. “It just means we don’t want to share those methods with bad actors who might exploit them.”

‘Concrete Evidence’

A few days before Christmas 2025, Nekhala was getting desperate. The online business he built with his friend and partner Mike Nusinkis was in shambles and they were defaulting on debt, including a loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration. He fired off connection requests and messages to high-ranking Amazon executives he found on LinkedIn, including Amazon Vice President Dharmesh Mehta, who oversaw seller services at the time. In his message to Mehta, Nekhala offered “concrete evidence of a major enforcement gap.”

After sending the message, Nekhala received a call from an Amazon representative who identified himself as Brandon O’Leary. Nekhala recorded the 20-minute call. He vented about how the Amazon suspension had decimated his business and how easily Amazon’s systems can be manipulated against good sellers. During the conversation, Nekhala pointed out that an employee had clearly provided his account records to Jenna. “The lady friggin’ showed up with my entire backend account history, which means she has inside access,” he said.

O’Leary replied, “Yeah, we’ll definitely look into that.”

After promising to send Nekhala an email with instructions about how he could submit evidence to Amazon, O’Leary said: “I want to put the least amount of work on you and the most amount of work on me to get to the bottom of this.”

As of late June, Nekhala said he hadn’t received instructions from Amazon about submitting evidence.

You can still buy Bed Scrunchies on Amazon for about $50 apiece. Nekhala sells them to an intermediary, which he says drives up the price shoppers pay by about $10 per unit. Amazon continues to collect about $7 in referral fees for each sale. And Nekhala said he still grudgingly shops on Amazon.

“They don’t want to have this evidence because it’s a liability,” Nekhala said. “They want this to just go away.”

Soper writes for Bloomberg.