Washington DC\u2019s attorney general is suing Amazon.com Inc., seeking civil penalties for allegedly misleading consumers who thought they were tipping delivery drivers but had the money diverted to cover the couriers’ base pay.<\/p>\n
The case, filed in Washington DC Superior Court, cites a 2021\u00a0settlement<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0between the company and the Federal Trade Commission, in which the agency found that Amazon withheld tips meant for its gig-economy drivers for more than two years.<\/p>\n The company had pledged that drivers would receive 100% of the value of tips, but Amazon instead used a portion of the gratuities to pay the base rate for its drivers, the FTC said.<\/p>\n The Seattle-based company agreed to pay $61.7 million to settle the matter, which was earmarked for drivers.<\/p>\n Amazon spokespeople at the time said the company disagreed that its prior pay practices were unclear.<\/p>\n \u201cMy office is suing Amazon for stealing tips from delivery drivers through a deceptive, illegal scheme that made consumers think they were increasing drivers’ pay when Amazon was actually diverting tips to reduce its own labor costs and increase profits,\u201d Washington DC attorney general Karl Racine said in a post on Twitter.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing is more important to us than customer trust,\u201d Amazon spokesperson Maria Boschetti said in an emailed statement.<\/p>\n \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Racine seeks restitution, a finding that Amazon\u2019s actions violated consumer protection statutes and civil penalties.<\/p>\n Racine\u2019s office had\u00a0sued<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0Amazon last year, alleging that the company engaged in anticompetitive practices that drove up prices for consumers.<\/p>\n A judge\u00a0dismissed<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0the case, saying there wasn\u2019t enough evidence to support the claims. Racine subsequently sought to revive it.<\/p>\n Washington DC\u2019s attorney general is suing Amazon.com, seeking civil penalties for allegedly misleading consumers who thought they were tipping delivery drivers but had the money diverted to cover the couriers’ base pay.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":473157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49317],"tags":[723,7689,63733,46501,47792],"class_list":["post-473155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-it-services","tag-amazon","tag-amazon-com","tag-couriers","tag-delivery-service","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read: AWS recruiting and building data centres while rest of Amazon freezes hiring<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"