Seattle, Washington - How do you, an e-commerce monopoly, snuff out competition and improve your bottom line? Copy the products that sell well and rebrand them for yourself. Oh, and be sure to manipulate your search engine to place your in-house products in the top three results.

Amazon.com Inc documents reveal that the company has been ripping off retailers their growing Indian market by using sales data to see which products are hot, Reuters reported.

Then Amazon copies successful products and sells the copies as their own brand. The company has also been manipulating their search engine to place their knock-off products at the top of the results list.

Amazon's private brands' team in India has been secretly copying products using sales data and rigged search machine results since 2016, according to the internal Amazon documents.

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Retail King Kishore Biyani is one person whose merchandise has been copied. His popular Indian shirt brand, John Miller, was duplicated down to the measurements, even the sleeve length and neck circumference.

In 2020, former CEO Jeff Bezos told Congress that the company explicitly prohibits its employees from pumping up the in-house brands' sales numbers by using data on specific retailers.

In 2019, another Amazon executive stated that the e-commerce giant does not use seller data to make its own products and that the company doesn't manipulate its search machine to favor Amazon private brands.

That stands in direct contradiction to what the company is actually doing.

Worst-case scenario: Amazon top brass lied under sworn oath to US Congress. Best-case scenario: Amazon doesn't know their own employees are ripping off successful sellers, manipulating search results, and undercutting competition.