The vendor in question had been a steady seller with a 7 year track record. It's really hard claim to swallow that that is plausibly an exit scam, even to an extremely naive fraud-detection system.
Seller does $12 M/yr revenue with Amazon. How much is an exit fraud worth? I find it difficult to believe that anyone on the black market is willing to pay anything close to the discounted future earnings of a $12 M/yr revenue business just to pursue an exit scam for about a week.
5% margins, which are in the realm of normal, on $12MM/year would be $600k. If you didn’t ship $3MM worth of product, that would be five years of profit.
But also: shit happens to people. They get into debt. Businesses go bad. There’s a reason Amazon has a system in place to flag and shutdown this pattern of activity. Maybe it was wrong in this case, but it exists for a reason. Chesterton’s Fence and all that.
There is also credit risk for an established business that maybe heading to bankruptcy. Amazon is essentially extending credit by paying sellers for items that may not have shipped. Given recent disruptions they are likely on high alert for credit risk as well.
I don't think they need to hold ~4 months of average sales to cover that risk when ship times are a handful of days. AMZN seems to have been holding funds on sales that were not only already shipped, but delivered.
