About 100 Amazon seller accounts were drained over six months this year as part of an “extensive” fraud by unidentified hackers. The ‘extensive’ fraud occurred between May and October 2018 with hackers breaking into the accounts of 100 Amazon sellers and funneling cash from loans or sales into their own bank accounts. The internet giant believes that the intruders changed account details at Barclays and Prepay Technologies.
The information comes from a redacted U.K. filing from November which has now been made public.
Amazon said in the filing that it believes the hackers managed to change account details on the Seller Control platform to match their own accounts at Barclays and Prepay Technologies, which is partly owned by Mastercard. The filing doesn’t indicate how the suspected hackers were able to add details of additional banks to the merchant accounts, according to Bloomberg.
The company’s lawyers asked a London judge to approve searches of account statements at Barclays and Prepay “to investigate the fraud, identify and pursue the wrongdoers, locate the whereabouts of misappropriated funds, bring the fraud to an end and deter future wrongdoing,” according to a court filing.
Barclays and Prepay “have become innocently mixed up in the wrongdoing,” according to the Amazon filing. The first fraudulent transaction occurred on May 16, 2018, the filing indicated, though Bloomberg said it’s unclear how much the hackers actually stole.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the case but said that any seller who believes they have received a phishing email should send a message to stop-[email protected].