Amazon warns AI fraud hits India’s new net users hardest

Amazon's global trust and safety chief, Rohan Oommen, has said that protecting millions of first-time online shoppers from AI-powered scams is India's next big e-commerce challenge. He told TOI that the rapid influx of digital commerce users from tier-2 and tier-3 cities makes India distinct from mature markets like the US, where e-commerce adoption has plateaued. Generative AI has made fraud more sophisticated by enabling fake identities, forged documents and synthetic reviews, but it has also strengthened Amazon's ability to detect abuse at scale.

Amazon's latest Trustworthy Shopping Experience Report states the company removed nearly 300 million fake reviews, took down about 70,000 phishing websites, and acted against around 14,000 scam-linked phone numbers globally last year. Oommen said phone-based fraud remains harder to tackle than fake websites because establishing attribution is significantly more difficult. On platform accountability, he said Amazon does not wait for regulation before acting against fraud.

Meanwhile, Amazon, Meesho and Flipkart are racing to build AI tools for sellers, Inc42 reports. Amazon has launched an AI-powered seller assistant that allows sellers to use plain English or Hinglish for onboarding, catalogue creation and inventory management. Meesho's AI voice system handles up to 300,000 seller calls a day. Flipkart via its Commerce Cloud sells an AI-ready stack for demand forecasting and pricing intelligence.