US lawmakers seek criminal probe of Amazon for lying about use of seller data

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Amazon lied to Congress about its use associated with third-party seller data, the House Judiciary Committee said today. In a letter to the Department of Justice, the committee chairs asked prosecutors to investigate the company} for criminal obstruction of Congress.

“Amazon lied through a senior executive’s sworn testimony that Amazon did not make use of any of the troves of data it had collected on its third-party sellers to compete with them, ” the letter says (emphasis in the original).

The committee said that not only was Amazon’s sworn testimony knowingly false but that repeated attempts to get Amazon to correct the record or to provide evidence in order to substantiate its claims were either rebuffed or ignored.