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Amazon Pay, risk & compliance

Counterfeit & Trademark Detection

A monitoring vendor had the technology, but lacked the domain expertise to detect counterfeit products and trademark infringement. I helped turn that knowledge gap into a new detection capability.

RiskComplianceFraud

The Problem

Amazon Pay's vendor monitored hundreds of thousands of merchant websites for compliance risks, but counterfeit products and trademark infringement never surfaced. The vendor had engineers who could build detection systems. They just didn't know what counterfeit or trademark infringement actually looked like.

Role
Program Manager

What I did

  • Learned the vendor's detection logic, then spent two weeks teaching their engineering and product teams the difference between counterfeit and trademark infringement, using documentation with real examples and screenshots.
  • Focused detection on reliable signals that surface high-quality investigative leads, like unrealistic pricing for premium brands, instead of trying to automate human judgment.
  • Wrote the investigation SOPs, trained a team lead as the internal subject matter expert, and made the documentation part of onboarding so the capability outlived the project.

The Outcome

The vendor launched the new detection capability and surfaced around 200 potential cases in the initial rollout. I reviewed the first 100 myself: roughly 90% were legitimate counterfeit concerns. The vendor later told me they had folded what I taught them into the services they sell to other clients.

Technology alone doesn't solve every problem. Sometimes the missing piece is domain expertise.

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Laura Barry — Operations & Program Management
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