Amazon on Thursday announced the Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX), an industry collaboration designed to make it safer to shop online and more difficult for counterfeiters to move among different stores to attempt to sell their counterfeit goods.
The Exchange will allow participating stores to share information about confirmed counterfeiters who attempted to use their services to try to sell counterfeit products.
The global conglomerate said that it has already detected hundreds of matching accounts where the same counterfeiter tried to create selling accounts on Amazon and at least one other store operator through ACX.
“The power of ACX comes from the fact that as soon as one of the participating stores catches a counterfeiter and shares the account information through the exchange, all the other stores participating in ACX can know about that counterfeiter and can stop them even more quickly in their store. Each participant makes its own independent decisions about whether and how to use the information in ACX,” explained Amazon in a press release.
Amazon said that by sharing information about these counterfeiters, ACX participants can identify and stop perpetrators more quickly than they would in the absence of this collaborative data sharing. In accordance with industry standards and best practices, an independent third party provides anonymised access for participants to share and receive information.
ACX has enabled regular information sharing and participants can use this information in their ongoing efforts to detect and address counterfeiting, improve their individual risk evaluation systems, and make more robust referrals to law enforcement so bad actors can be held accountable.
Amazon has been working with other members of ACX to pilot the exchange, ensure the appropriate guardrails, and design a scalable way to broaden participation to additional companies interested in stopping counterfeiters.