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

**Repost for regional attention!

A beloved member of our community in Asheville, Yoshi, has gone missing near Merrimon Avenue and the UNCA area. If you’ve spotted him or have any information, please send me a DM.

Yoshi is a very smol and old beagle that is wearing a collar with the owner's contact information. Please keep an eye out and share this post. Thank you all!

Will they stop running this nonsense ad now??

I don't recall yellow being in there.

Thanks.

Looking to upgrade my license to a real
ID since its renewal time and snagged an appointment at this location for next week. Are they pretty efficient? It’s about a 45 minute drive for me from the triangle.