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Comment by masonhensley | Hacker News Reader

> In total, after their fraudulent reinstatement, the products and merchants earned in excess of $100 million in sales revenue.

Woah. Was not expecting it to be that big.

> More specifically, the Indictment alleges that the defendants served as consultants to so-called third-party (“3P”) sellers on the Amazon Marketplace.

Most companies have their employees sign onboarding documents or do an annual "business conduct" policy review. Any thoughts on a better way to manage something like this at scale? On one hand, I have a bad taste in my mouth from past employment situations that dictate "we own every though that enters your mind 24/7" - but consulting regarding your current employer, yikes.

I guess ethics aren't boolean to some.

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There's some space been the extremes. You're normally not allowed to say anything that would be a company secret, but nothing should stop you from consulting on Amazon Marketplace as long as you use only public information you know very well. If you're already past ignoring company secrets, is unlikely preventing other employment would stop you already.

As for actual fixes, I think safety critical systems already have some answers: require 2 person confirmations, audit access, correlate repeated issues.

Mandatory vacations of certain length without system access is another common one.

This is a good one. If you’ve been tending to something rotten this gives others a chance to smell it.

I used to think you couldn’t possibly get any of those ethics courses wrong, until I saw someone close to me struggle through one.

It’s just not as obvious to some people I suppose.

> consulting regarding your current employer

The 6 defendants weren't Amazon employees.

One is a former Amazon worker, who was involved in the activity while employed:

> In the course of the conspiracy described in the Indictment, the defendants paid bribes to at least ten different Amazon employees and contractors, including KUNJU, who accepted bribes as a seller-support associate in Hyderabad, India, before becoming an outside consultant who recruited and paid bribes to his former colleagues. In exchange for those bribes, the corrupted employees and contractors took the following illicit steps [...]

Business conduct doesn’t work in countries like India which is rife with corruption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

$100M in sales is only like $5M in profits at Amazon merchant profit levels.

Don't outsource critical business logic (like whether an 8-9 figure account should be suspended) to Indian low level contractors?

This has long been a major issue with Amazon - often the people making the decisions as to whether a business with dozens of employees gets to keep selling or goes bankrupt are being paid less than US minimum wage in another country.

> to Indian low level contractors

So this style of casual racism / xenophobia is ok if directed at approved targets?

Pretty sure if it happened to be 6 African American individuals who were indicted it would not be acceptable to say "Don't outsource your work to low-level Black contractors".

Consider that the US DOJ has no authority to investigate, arrest or prosecute in India, India being a sovereign independent state.

Also,

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

What a good rule to live ones life by!

Many examples can be hiddenly loaded, not well-constructed rule

The difference is that people from other countries are generally not subject to US jurisdiction. Certainly the deterrence effect from stories like this is far larger for US based employees and contractors than foreign ones.

It's not xenophobic to prefer US employees for sensitive positions of trust, where the rule of US law is relevant.

So it'd be okay to say it for contractors in Africa, who are black and who are also not under US jurisdiction?

If a company was outsourcing critical business logic to, say, Nigeria, I would absolutely criticize them for that. The color would have nothing to do with it.

Yes, generally putting critical access in the hands of foreign contractors, especially in third world or developing countries is a terrible idea. It has nothing to do with race. If you outsource to white Russian contractors in Russia you could be just as fucked.

Except the fact that Amazon's office in Hyderabad India is the their largest in the world [1]. We are not talking about contractors - they are employees like any in their Seattle one, many actually do relocate back from US to India office.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/business/amazon-hyderabad...

I think the implication is that someone poorly paid and lightly supervised is more susceptible to bribery. Whether they are a contractor or full employee, or the color of their skin, is irrelevant. I personally doubt pay makes a difference, either you have integrity or you do not.

All in all, this is very embarrassing for Amazon.

Correct, and if a US political party outsources their IT management to white folks overseas in eastern Europe (outside of EU) / Russia or former Russian states where US law does not apply they'd be equally idiotic.

Yeah I think that would be fine, ignoring the fact that Africa isn't a country and India is. American isn't a race, and neither is Indian.

> Pretty sure if it happened to be 6 African American individuals who were indicted it would not be acceptable to say "Don't outsource your work to low-level Black contractors".

Notice the word in italics? The US would still have jurisdiction.

GovCloud is also not allowed to be administered by Indians but is allowed to be run by Indian Americans. It can’t be run by people from Great Britain either.

Referring (india, a country not a color) to Issues relating to doing business/relying on decisions via work takin plce in a country other than the one where the business and its customers are is a bit different than ‘black’

The point was that the two Amazon employees were citizens of India and took the bribes in India, so they were outside US jurisdiction.

Than why not say 'in India', instead of 'Indian'? There are many Indian people living and working in the US, with US citizenship. Conversely, if they had been US citizens ('Americans') living in India, the legal problem may have been similar.

Saying 'low-level Indian contractors' brings to mind a specific, at least somewhat xenophobic, image,and is very often used very casually.

Well said. There are Indians under US jurisdiction. It is painful to see people contorting themselves to defend xenophobia and casual racism.

Legally speaking, US citizens would still be liable.

The vast majority of people living on India are Indian, no?

Almost everyone living in India is Indian, but not all Indians live in India.

But if I were a betting man, I'd wager that the vast majority of Indians in the world do live in India, based purely on the population total of India.

True. But most of the people commenting here in this thread are not from India, so most of the Indians we interact with are probably not in India.

You seem to have assumed that the poster is talking about ethnicity or heritage rather than citizenship or geographical location.

One of the things that I like about HN over (say) Reddit is the guidelines for comments work pretty well. I’m particularly thinking of “Assume good faith.” - absent any other evidence, it’s better to assume that other posters are not racist assholes if you’re not sure if someone is talking about citizenship versus ethnicity.

I assume it would be perfectly fine if they directed these kinds of decisions to Indian high level FTE’s. The problem here is not that they’re Indian :P

Credible research suggests that levels of honesty differ across countries:

Gächter, S. and Schulz, J.F., 2016. Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies. Nature, 531(7595), pp.496-499. Hugh-Jones, D., 2016. Honesty, beliefs about honesty, and economic growth in 15 countries. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 127, pp.99-114.

NB: I'm the author of the latter.

This doesn't have to imply racism, there are numerous reasons why people might behave differently in different environments. Different culture, different institutional incentives, a different economic environment....

5 out of 6 people here were not based in India or another cheap labour country, so we've already for a counterexample.

Most of those people weren't Amazon employees. The two employees indicted were India based (read the actual indictment, one of them moved to the US later).

That’s still 4 out of 6.

What exactly is your point?

You can't see that?

No, it's unclear why the location of people that never worked for Amazon is relevant in this context.

Casual racism is not ok man, this has nothing to do with nationality. I know tech industry workers are sensitive about outsourcing, but don't make it about nationality. If these companies are happy to sell in India they should not have problem hiring.

India regularly extradites people who have been indicted in USA.

You can't honestly tell me you believe the deterrence effect is just as strong whether someone is US based or not.

It can be, Indian call center scammers are more scared of FBI than Indian law enforcement.

Criminals have different value set nothing to do with nationality. We still have a article on the front page about an American CEO embezzing funds. You will not hear anyone saying be careful of American CEOs.

That's not the relevant comparison.

So you're saying that it's ok to for Amazon to sell in India but not hire there?

Please read the above comments, in particular the part about critical business functions.

You originally stated that: This has long been a major issue with Amazon - often the people making the decisions as to whether a business with dozens of employees gets to keep selling or goes bankrupt are being paid less than US minimum wage in another country.

So I'm assuming you're saying that they shouldn't hire in India apparently because of less than minimum wage. So these kinds of things can be avoided if Amazon were to hire decision makers who make minimum wage or whatever the lowest amount they can get away with in US?

As you know, the sellers and buyers are global. So should Amazon divide its operations so that Indian employees only process sales and purchases based in India? What happens with sales from India to USA or vice-versa?

I am failing to grasp what exactly it is that you are saying here. With respect to extradition, India and USA already have a treaty.

>So I'm assuming you're saying that they shouldn't hire in India apparently because of less than minimum wage.

That's not what I said.

>So these kinds of things can be avoided if Amazon were to hire decision makers who make minimum wage or whatever the lowest amount they can get away with in US?

That would address some of the issues and not others, all of which were laid out in my original comment. (Hint: read the words after "Indian".)

>process sales and purchases

This had nothing to do with my comment, which is clearly not about people processing sales.

>That would address some of the issues and not others, all of which were laid out in my original comment. (Hint: read the words after "Indian".)

I originally literally quoted the entire sentence from your original comment, which came after "Indian". We could do without the snide remarks. I was genuinely trying to get your position, but all you are doing is making snide remarks and attempting to make yourself sound more knowledgeable than you are about the issue.

You twice made incorrect assumptions about what I believed. That's not necessary if you're just trying to understand it.

Now you're asserting that I'm lacking some knowledge about the issue, without bothering to specify what knowledge, specifically, I might be lacking.

This is not how good faith conversations tend to go.

If criminals in India are more afraid of the FBI than Indian law enforcement, that tells me Indian law enforcement is bad. I want my employees to be under the jurisdiction of good law enforcement, not bad law enforcement.

That's xenophobia clouding your judgement. These crimes are happening in USA so of course US law enforcement gets them.

>Indian call center scammers are more scared of FBI than Indian law enforcement.

I thought that "Indian call center" means that it's in India.

This is the kind of non-racist, non-stereotyping, and non-xenophobic advice that will make Amazon great again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon

It's hard to gauge intent, but I interpreted that message as "don't try to trim costs by outsourcing critical decisions to extremely low paid workers; especially in another country".

I mean, should we try to use euphemisms for China's control of chipmaking? Or the German emission cheating scandal?

Simply referencing a country or race doesn't make you racist. Interpreting it though...

> I mean, should we try to use euphemisms for China's control of chipmaking? Or the German emission cheating scandal?

When that extends to Chinese people or Germans that is racist.

I’m of Indian heritage. This isn’t about the reviewers being Indian per se.

It’s about a compliance function being placed in a country with poor law enforcement, low pay relative to the activity they’re monitoring and geographic/cultural separation from HQ. If you read about a bank whose traders are in New York and whose risk and compliance are in Tokyo, what would you think? And Tokyo has decent cops and high pay.

This is, fundamentally, about Amazon treating this function as a cost centre versus brand defence.

> Tokyo has decent cops and high pay.

No issue with your general point, but Tokyo having decent pay is generally not true and cops being decent is debatable.

Were the Amazon employees who accepted the bribes from India? I don't see that mentioned anywhere on the link. It seems the third party contractors were hired by the Amazon sellers to bribe on their behalf.

Edit: On reading the full indictment, there is no mention of the national origin of any employees of Amazon. The 6 accused knew each other and were exchanging insider information from undisclosed Amazon employees with third party sellers in return for a fee. A couple of them were ex-Amazon employees who presumably used their insider knowledge to build confidence with the third party sellers, but I don't think they are being charged for using that knowledge.

Not sure how this would be prevented if Amazon did not have operations in India?

Nishad Kunju of Hyderabad, India is the only defendant named as a former Amazon employee. The others bribed him, then he left the company and bribed his former colleagues.

Oh gosh I'm blind, I missed that line completely from the summary page.

But does that mean all the bribes were given to employees in India? I wonder why they are not being charged? Perhaps because that part of the fraud happened within the Indian jurisdiction? Or are maybe they are waiting on Indian law enforcement to formally charge them.

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