Today, as
Amazon dealt with a site-wide outage impacting thousands of customers, the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine,
filed a lawsuit [PDF] against the online shopping giant for deceiving its customer base.
In a press release, Racine said that Amazon still needs to pay for tricking DC consumers by “stealing” portions of their Amazon Flex delivery driver tips between 2016 and 2019 and “secretly” diverting millions to “reduce its own labor costs and increase profits.”
Amazon already paid
$61.7 million in restitution to Amazon Flex drivers after the Federal Trade Commission investigated. But Racine said Amazon “has thus far escaped appropriate accountability, including any civil penalties, for consumer harm.” In his complaint, filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Racine is seeking, so far, unawarded “civil penalties in connection with the misrepresentations and omissions it made to consumers with respect to these deceptive tipping practices.”
“When a company is caught stealing from its workers, it is not enough for the company to repay the amount stolen,” Racine’s complaint said. “Stealing from workers is theft, and significant penalties are necessary to strongly disincentivize this unlawful conduct.”
A spokesperson for Racine’s office told Ars that Amazon has three weeks to respond to the court filing. An Amazon spokesperson, Maria Boschetti, provided a statement to Ars.
“Nothing is more important to us than customer trust,” Boschetti told Ars. “This lawsuit involves a practice we changed three years ago and is without merit. All of the customer tips at issue were already paid to drivers as part of a settlement last year with the FTC.”
arstechnica.com
