Mr. Ed Brophy:

I thank the committee for the invitation to Amazon to attend this session. I am head of public policy for Amazon in Ireland. I am joined by my colleague, Abigail Bishop, global head of external relations in Amazon’s scam prevention division. Ms Bishop leads a global team working closely with organisations and individuals to combat scams and to prevent fraud internationally.

We have been invited to speak about authorised push payment, APP, fraud. I will provide the committee with a short overview of Amazon’s approach to addressing fraudulent activity more broadly and APP fraud in particular. We are also happy to answer any questions the committee may have.

I will give a little bit of background on Amazon in Ireland. Next year, Amazon will celebrate our 20th anniversary in Ireland, having first invested here in 2004, and we look forward to many more years of investing in the country. We employ more than 6,500 people in Dublin, Cork, Drogheda and in additional regional locations in diverse roles, such as data engineers, operations managers and financial staff. Over the past three years, we opened our first fulfilment centre in Dublin on the N7 and then at Ballycoolin, which created 500 new jobs and will continue to grow. We have more than 1,200 Irish SMEs selling on Amazon, creating more than 3,500 jobs. Irish SMEs on Amazon recorded €150 million in export sales last year, which was an increase of 25% from 2021.

We also make multiple investments in skills development and community, including: establishing a programme with the Technological University Dublin to train data centre engineers; supporting establishment of the Tallaght district heating scheme - the first in Ireland; launching a start-up loft for growing companies at our Dublin office; and offering career choice to our fulfilment centre employees, which pays 95% of their course tuition in high-demand fields over four years.

Turning to fraud and APP fraud in particular, scams affect everyone. Like most people, I regularly receive scam texts and calls myself. Scammers are clever and impersonate trusted brands just enough to seem legitimate. Scams today are complex, scammers use many methods and scams are global. Scammers are innovative, creative and opportunistic, keeping up with the times. This is a significant issue in Ireland, but in Amazon we have seen to date limited evidence of APP scams across our services.

Amazon is a retail store and, as such, we generally do not see this type of fraud on our store or through our services themselves. However, as one of the world’s most trusted and recognisable brands, scammers unfortunately do seek to use our name in their scams to afford themselves further credibility.

Our focus on scam prevention at Amazon starts with our broader mission to be the world's most customer-centric company. Our mission is at the heart of everything we do and drives us to deliver an amazing customer experience. It includes a commitment to protect our customers from scammers who would take advantage of their trust in us. When a scammer attempts to take advantage of our customers using the Amazon name, we take that seriously. Amazon is committed to protecting consumers by preventing scammers from impersonating Amazon’s brand or anyone else’s.

As members will appreciate, we work proactively against the impersonation of Amazon and our brand. For example, in 2022, we invested more than €1.2 billion and employed more than 15,000 people, including machine learning scientists, software developers and expert investigators, who were dedicated to protecting customers, brands, selling partners and our store from counterfeit, fraud and other forms of abuse.

Turning to fraud prevention, in order to further combat these scams, we have a number of secure mechanisms on our store, namely, customers can view order and communication history with Amazon by logging into their account and checking the message centre; the buyer-seller messaging tool we offer provides a secure channel for customers to communicate with Amazon sellers; we implemented email verification technology across more than 20 countries to make it easier for customers to distinguish authentic communications from Amazon; and, available in 20 countries and languages, our self-service reporting tool, available at amazon.com/ReportAScam,is available online and in our app to enable simple, speedy, and standardised reporting.

Beyond the protections in place in our store, our team is working to protect customers from scammers through consumer education and enforcement actions. Amazon reinforces scam avoidance best practices in its communications, including working with consumer organisations on awareness campaigns, sending regular direct emails to hundreds of millions of customers around the world and amplifying our communications policies through our channels. We also continue to innovate with our tech solutions.

We have zero tolerance for scammers who attempt to impersonate Amazon. Last year, we initiated takedowns of more than 20,000 phishing websites and 10,000 phone numbers being used for impersonation scams. We referred hundreds of bad actors across the world to law enforcement to help them ensure that these scammers are held accountable. All of these efforts have been acknowledged by the US Department of Justice, among others.

To conclude my opening statement, Amazon strives to be the world's most customer-centric company. Maintaining the trust and safety of our customers is absolutely paramount to us. We have taken many steps to increase customer trust and to prevent fraud. We work to secure our customers’ funds and personal financial information. This is the case in Ireland as much as it is in any other country, and we will continue to work on this for our customers. We look forward to any questions the committee may have.