Inside an Amazon project reportedly designed to spy on competitors

Amazon apparently has a lot in common with a fictional monkey that hangs out with a man in a yellow hat. For years, the tech giant has been gathering intel on its competitors via an internal project codenamed “Project Curiosity,” according to a new investigative report from The Wall Street Journal.

How Project Curiosity worked: Started in 2015, the project’s initial aim was to better understand and improve the experiences of e-commerce sellers across various online marketplaces, per the Journal.

Senior management gave the team working on the project approval to create a shell company, buy inventory, and find warehouses so they could pose as sellers on competitors’ websites.

• The operation, run under the company banner “Big River Services International”, has grown to sell ~$1 million/year of goods via e-commerce marketplaces – including eBay, Shopify, Walmart, and, yes, Amazon.

Like early NASA, hidden figures are crucial to its success. Project Curiosity has purposely worked to establish a delineation between Big River and Amazon, per the Journal.

• Team members communicate with any outside entity using a non-Amazon email address, but use an Amazon email address to communicate internally.
• Reports are also sent to Amazon execs using printed, numbered copies rather than email to limit the paper trail.

📝 Bottom line: Nearly every company researches its competitors. But Elizabeth Rowe, a University of Virginia law-school professor who specializes in trade secret law, told the WSJ that misrepresentation to competitors to gain proprietary info can lead to lawsuits regarding trade secret misappropriation.