- A 28-year-old former Amazon employee was sentenced to 10 months in prison, per the DOJ.
- Rohit Kadimisetty was involved in a bribery scheme targeting Amazon’s Marketplace.
- The scheme paid Amazon employees in India to leak confidential information on third-party sellers.
A former Amazon employee was sentenced Friday to 10 months in prison for taking part in an international bribery scheme, according to the US Department of Justice.
Rohit Kadimisetty from Northridge, California, is one of six individuals indicted for a fraud and bribery scheme intended to manipulate the Amazon Marketplace.
According to CNBC, Kadimisetty worked at Amazon as a seller support employee until 2015. He was based in Hyderabad, India.
After relocating to the US, Kadimisetty “used his inside knowledge” to hire employees in India “to misuse their employee privileges and access to internal information, systems, and tools,” per the DOJ.
The DOJ added that the bribery scheme was run from late 2017 to 2020. The scheme was designed to benefit certain third-party sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace across the US. Kadimisetty and the other defendants served as “consultants” and a “middleman of sorts” to these sellers.
The services they provided included: “Stealing confidential business information about Amazon algorithms,” as well as “facilitating attacks on competing sellers and product listings,” according to the DOJ.
Amazon did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Kadimisetty and the other individuals involved allegedly paid $100,000 worth of bribes to the employees, the DOJ said.
Kadimisetty left the enterprise in late 2018 and pleaded guilty to his involvement in the bribery scheme.
In addition to his prison sentence, Kadimisetty was also fined $50,000 and ordered to take three years of supervised release, according to CNBC.
Four of the other defendants will face trial in October 2022.
Last month, another former Amazon employee hit headlines for illicit activity. Douglas Wright faced up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $273,000 worth of computer parts and selling them to a wholesaler in California.