Another one of those, what a joy it is to be living in the 21st century stories. Made doubly worse by Amazon draggig its heels on obviously bogus claims
Inc.com report
There are lots of obstacles facing online merchants these days and here’s the newest: cease and desist letters written by people pretending to be lawyers at law firms that don’t actually exist. That’s what reportedly happened to Brushes4Less, an Amazon Marketplace store whose most popular product is a replacement toothbrush head. Or at least it was, until Amazon delisted it shortly before Amazon Prime Day in July.
Amazon sent an email sent to Brushes4Less’s owner to explain that the product was being suspended due to an intellectual property violation complaint filed by an attorney from the law firm Wesley & McCain in Pittsburgh. In order to get the product reinstated, the email said, Brushes4Less would have to contact the law firm and work things out.
But when he tried to do that, Brushes4Less’s owner discovered that Wesley & McCain didn’t really exist. Its website showed a photo of lawyers that appeared to have been stolen from a different law firm in Missouri. (The “Wesley & McCain” web address now leads to a 404 message.) Its phone number didn’t work, and its physical address appeared to belong to a different law firm altogether. The email address listed in the complaint–which Amazon passed along to Brushes4Less, urging the store’s owner to resolve the matter directly–turned out to be fake as well.
As Brushes4Less’s owner told CNBC reporter Eugene Kim, Amazon could have figured out that the complaint was bogus with about five minutes of detective work. Instead, it took two months for Amazon to reinstate the product. That meant that Brushes4Less’s most popular item was not available for sale on Prime Day, which turned out to be Amazon’s busiest shopping day ever. Not only that, because Brushes4Less uses Amazon’s fulfillment service, the brush heads spent those two months in an Amazon warehouse, so Brushes4Less’s owner couldn’t sell them elsewhere either. He says the two-month delisting cost him about $200,000 in sales. He says he generates about $2 million in annual sales on Amazon overall.
More at https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/if-you-sell-on-amazon-a-fake-law-firm-could-boot-y.html
