Amazon’s Dirty Secret: The Marketplace Manipulation Destroying American Businesses (Like Mine)

America’s greatest strength is innovation. When intellectual property can be copied at scale and flooded into the market by coordinated overseas infringers, innovation becomes a losing business model.

Chinese networks control 63% of Amazon’s marketplace, $35 billion annually, often using shell brands to dominate search, manipulate rankings, and destroy American businesses like mine that actually innovate and hold patents.

I’m the inventor of BeltBro, a patented no-buckle elastic belt with over 3 million customers. But this isn’t about my small 5-person Florida company. It’s about systematic marketplace manipulation that Amazon refuses to stop.

42 of the Top 100 “New Releases” Are the Same Product

Amazon features the “Top 100 New Releases” in each category.

The Men’s list here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/fashion/2474947011

The Women’s list here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/fashion/2474940011

What you may notice is that in the Men’s category, listings 1 through 19, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 42, 43, 46, 54, 58, 63, 66, 67, 71, 74, 88, 90, 94, all use similar listing images, descriptions, product dimensions, etc. The launch dates are nearly identical. They feature copy-paste language, images and video across multiple listings.

Many even feature the “H” logo on their product. In fact, we’ve identified over 430 listings+ that all share this same product template. Nearly all the listings were created in the two months between December 2025 and January 2026.

The Review Manipulation

If you look at most of these listings and click on their “5 star” reviews, and then click on the people’s names who are rating the product, you’ll see they also rate every other product as 5 stars (paid reviewer networks outside of the Vine program, which is explicitly against the Amazon terms of service).

Even though we’ve reported these fake reviews, Amazon refuses to remove them.

When we go after these sellers through Amazon’s APEX program to deal with patent infringement (we also own patents on the metal hook attachment), we are only able to submit 10 ASINs. However, during the same period we see 100+ new identical listings pop up.

The Sponsored Ads Flood

It’s not just the vast amount of duplicate listings, it’s also the fact that the majority of these listings are running SPONSORED ads, completely flooding the legitimate marketplace.

Surprisingly, if you look at the listings and see how many units are sold, even listings with fewer than 5 reviews are selling 300–800 units monthly.

And because there’s over 430+ listings, they also are dominating most of the SEO search terms related to our category.

Not to mention they have lowered their prices to as low as $6.99, which converts a lot of hesitant customers into buyers due to having the lowest pricing.

Amazon Turns a Blind Eye

We’ve submitted evidence numerous times to Amazon, including the widespread manipulative tactics, fraudulent reviews, and evidence of a coordinated seller network, but Amazon turns a blind eye. They refuse to give us an “APEX ID” (and refuse to tell us what is needed to qualify for an APEX ID), which would allow us to report more than 10 infringements.

We’ve already won an APEX infringement case (the seller did not respond to Amazon’s arbitration), yet we still didn’t receive an APEX ID.

Here’s what they said about how to qualify for an APEX ID: “Your patent has not yet been granted an APEX ID as it has not met the criteria to receive one. Please note we are not able to discuss this criteria.”

When we tried to submit more ASINs for review this was Amazon’s response: “Please note that we have received 33 additional APEX applications from you regarding this same patent. We are unable to accept new applications or start concurrent evaluations and as such these additional cases will be closed.”

Our Amazon Sales Are Dropping Rapidly

As a small business owner in Florida, we depend on Amazon sales to pay our employees and for our business to survive. This doesn’t just affect our company or category, but is a widespread issue across the Amazon network.

Small American businesses that invest in R&D, file patents, and play by the rules can’t compete against coordinated networks flooding the marketplace with infringing identical products.

What We’re Asking For

If you work at Amazon, represent the Florida legislature or the US government, work in media, or have connections that can help, please share this investigation. We want to share our story.

Small businesses like ours employ Americans, innovate products, and contribute to local economies. We deserve a marketplace that rewards innovation instead of manipulation.

You can reach me directly at joshua@beltbro.com

More Evidence Below:

1. Use of the same listing images across multiple seller accounts:

2) Using BeltBro (our brand) videos on infringing product pages (you can see the “B” logo as indicated on our belts):

3) Duplicated listings across both Men’s and Women’s newest release (duplicate listings highlighted in red):

4) Many of the listings are using fake review networks, when you click on reviewer name that left a 5 star review, the reviewers rate every other item as 5 stars:

5) Example of bot farm negatively reviewing our belts. Every single review from this account happened on January 19th, 2026. They are sabotaging us with negative reviews.

Fake reviews from the same account all from January 19th, 2026:

6) Seller network coordinates pricing changes, driving down prices collectively:

7) Same “H” brand logo and identical infringing product across listings (This is the same brand which we previously won an Amazon APEX arbitration against and their main listing was removed). So they just create hundreds of new infringing accounts:

8) We estimate the network is generating tens of thousands of infringing sales monthly, which is potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue per month due to infringement.

9) After submitting all of this evidence to Amazon’s APEX team for review, especially highlighting the EXACT same “H” brand logo across dozens of listings, here was Amazon’s reply: “Thank you for writing. As previously stated, the ASINs you have listed in your messages do not appear to have been created to circumvent the APEX process nor created by the seller identified in Evaluation 18760886351.”

10) After winning our APEX arbitration against the infringing seller, they simply relisted the same product on the same account the same day! This happened 9 times! Each time we had to email the APEX team requesting they remove the infringing listing, and within hours a new infringing listing under the same account would appear.

There appears to be no mechanisms in place to ban repeat offending sellers or limit their ability to reupload infringing content. The infringing seller account continues to remain open today (even after losing the APEX arbitration and then re-uploading the same infringing content 9 separate times).

The Amazon Blackhat Playbook

In conclusion, what we’ve outlined is the step-by-step playbook that is destroying American innovation.

Find successful American brands, clone their products, create hundreds of seller accounts, use fake reviews to drive up rankings while targeting competitors with negative reviews. Buy sponsored ads to these listings while continuing to lower prices to drive out the competition. Profit from lax IP and fake review enforcement policies.

The NY Post also documented the same infringing playbook in their 2024 article about this topic.

This issue is not limited to Amazon. We are dealing with similar issues on TikTok, Facebook, Walmart and eBay. It’s clear the infringing sellers are using AI to quickly create stores and automatically re-upload any infringing content that happens to get removed.

Unless something changes to protect our intellectual property rights from copycats, the future of American innovation is in jeopardy.

Our story is not unique. Across categories, American owned e-commerce businesses report the same problems: widespread IP infringement and inconsistent enforcement mechanisms that can’t keep up with coordinated abuse.

This gap is widening as platforms reduce investigative staffing and push escalations into automated support systems that are not designed to evaluate complex evidence, identify networks, or drive meaningful remediation. Without credible enforcement, the market stops rewarding innovation and starts rewarding infringement.