Scams have started impacting Amazon sellers across Pakistan, which Marketplace Pulse says has the third-highest number of registered sellers on the platform
@SiddiquiZuha & I report🧵 https://restofworld.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Pakistan's seller base is a product of Amazon's global expansion push: during 2021's record seller influx, the platform was adding thousands of new sellers daily, and Marketplace Pulse now counts Pakistan as its third-largest registered-seller country. That growth arrived without the enforcement apparatus that matured elsewhere.
The scam wave hitting Pakistani sellers fits an established pattern: Amazon previously closed 3,000 accounts tied to roughly 600 Chinese brands for review fraud, and sellers have long gamed rankings through click farms and reviewers-for-hire. What is new is that the target population has shifted to a market where sellers are newer and protections thinner.
First-order effects
- Pakistani sellers — now one of Amazon's largest registered cohorts per Marketplace Pulse — face direct losses from scams targeting their accounts, listings, or payouts, with no indication yet of a dedicated Amazon remediation program for the market.
Second-order effects
- If enforcement and protection lag, displaced or burned sellers may follow the path of China-based sellers who, after being kicked off for rule violations, migrated to Walmart's marketplace to keep reaching US consumers.
Third-order effects
- Amazon's trust-and-safety burden is structurally migrating to emerging seller markets: each new high-growth cohort imports the fraud playbook already documented among Chinese and Shopify-based scammers, forcing platform-level verification and protection to scale faster than seller recruitment.
The trend: Marketplace fraud is following Amazon's seller expansion into new geographies, turning trust-and-safety capacity into the binding constraint on where the platform can grow.