Amazon employees leak secret info that marketplace sellers can buy on Telegram

For the millions of sellers who make up the booming Amazon marketplace, few things are as perpetually concerning as the threat of getting suspended for alleged wrongdoing and watching business evaporate overnight.

Helping third-party sellers recover their accounts has turned into a large and lucrative enterprise, because the only way the merchants can get back up and running is to admit guilt and correct the issue or show sufficient evidence that they did nothing wrong. The process is often costly, lengthy and fraught with challenges.

Enter the illicit broker.

For a fee of $200 to $400, sellers can pay for services like “Amazon Magic,” as one broker on encrypted messaging service Telegram calls it. The offerings also include access to company insiders who can remove negative reviews on a product and provide information on competitors. Users are told to send a private message to learn the price of certain services.

The Telegram group has over 13,000 members, and it’s far from the only one. Other brokers peddle similar services on Telegram as well as on WeChat, WhatsApp and Facebook Groups. The confidential data is promoted as intelligence gold for any seller working to get their product or account reinstated.

The groups are part of a robust market of so-called black hat service providers that have cropped up alongside the rise of third-party marketplaces on Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart. Amazon’s marketplace now accounts for over 60% of goods sold on the platform, and includes numerous businesses that generate millions of dollars a year in annual revenue on the site.

As it’s grown, the sprawling global marketplace has also seen a surge in the number of counterfeiters and spammers trying to game the system, which has pushed Amazon to ramp up…