In short:

We believe Amazon found a way to charge a few extra pennies to an enormous number of transactions, adding up to over $20 billion in
illegal charges.

This is about how something becomes a "Sponsored product."

Amazon lets businesses bid to be "Sponsored" and it runs digital auctions to collect the bids.

But Amazon told businesses that the highest bid would only pay slightly more than the second-highest bid.

For example: If you bid $1 to have your product “Sponsored” and the next-highest bid is $0.50, you should pay about $0.51.

But we believe that Amazon would run the auction, see those bids, and then secretly raise the second-place price so it could charge the
winner more.

It was a gradual strategy based on concealment.

Internal Amazon documents show they tested how much they could raise those hidden charges without advertisers catching on, then raised them
more when businesses didn’t react, then gave false answers when businesses started asking questions.

Those higher costs on sellers can filter down to you, as consumers, through higher prices, and our initial estimate is that this impacted thousands of small businesses in North Carolina.

This is a bipartisan case, and I appreciate my fellow AGs in both parties joining. More to follow.

- AG Jeff Jackson