43 Americans · Case 1 of 43

Ephraim "Ed" Rosenberg

Named in the indictment as Ephraim Rosenberg; known throughout the industry as Ed. Seller advocate, Brooklyn, New York. Founded ASGTG, the largest independent community of Amazon third-party sellers in the world. Named first of six defendants in a conspiracy the Justice Department announced at $100 million. The government that charged him recommended he serve no prison time. No victim has ever come forward. No restitution was ever ordered. No seller account was ever suspended over anything he did. His community has doubled in size since the indictment. And six years on, the sellers who know that industry still do not recognize the crime that was announced.

Ephraim "Ed" Rosenberg is Case No. 1 of the 43 Americans. This is 43 Americans, a record of forty-three federal criminal cases in which the public court file does not match the account the Justice Department gave the country. Every case here is documented from filings rather than from a summary written by a supporter, and every page prints the facts that cut against its subject. Ed Rosenberg built this record after his own conviction, and he is the first case in it. Read the other forty-two.

Written and published by 250pardons.com. Ephraim Rosenberg provided documents and answered questions for it. The arguments, characterizations and conclusions are ours, not his, and not his lawyers'.

What he apologized for was not what the government announced

Before he was sentenced, Ed Rosenberg published a public apology. It was a written statement, posted beneath an eleven-second video in which he says only that an important message follows and asks people to read it. Here is what he admitted, in his own words:

Annotations are the internal notes Amazon's staff write on a seller's account explaining why it was suspended. Sellers are not shown them. Without them, a suspended business is guessing at what it did wrong.

That is the whole of it. Notes, and payments to get them.

It is also, word for word, the whole of what his plea agreement says he did. The statement of facts he signed under oath describes paying for confidential account information. Nothing more.

A statement of facts is the section of a plea agreement listing exactly what the defendant admits. It is the legal boundary of a guilty plea. Anything outside it was not admitted.

He did not set out to recruit an Amazon insider. Annotations were traded by anonymous accounts across Telegram, Facebook groups and seller forums, and that is where he bought them. The Justice Department later identified one of those accounts as a Seattle-based Amazon employee, and said Rosenberg paid that person more than $18,000 over a three-year period. He has never learned the person's name.

His plea agreement puts total bribes above $100,000 — but the agreement's own words are "by or through him or his co-conspirators." That is the figure for all six defendants, not for Rosenberg alone. And he did not sign that agreement and then hope for probation. The recommendation of no prison time was inside the bargain before he signed it.

Now compare that to what the public was told.

The Justice Department's 2020 press release described a conspiracy worth more than $100 million. Its 2023 sentencing release said Rosenberg purchased forged supplier documents — paperwork faking where products came from.

Neither appears in his plea. Neither appears in his apology.

The $100 million figure comes from the indictment, which defines it plainly: the combined economic impact of the entire six-defendant case, made up mostly of sales that third-party sellers earned after their accounts were reinstated. It was never a loss. It was never Ed Rosenberg's. It was the revenue of other people's businesses, added together.

And the forged documents were somebody else's conduct. The indictment makes that allegation against all defendants collectively. It names Rosenberg individually in nine separate acts — none of them involving an invoice. Rosenberg says those nine were selected from years of correspondence and presented without the context around them. The Justice Department's own announcement in the same case attributed supplier-document forgery to a different defendant, by name.

The record supports him. He admitted what he did — obtaining internal notes, and paying for them. He has never taken it back. What he has never been able to do is get anyone to correct the difference between that and the headline.

What the accusation was worth

A $100 million headline in 2020.

By the time of sentencing, the government's own guidelines calculation put the value of the bribes at between $95,000 and $150,000 — across six defendants, over three years. His final offense level was 13, the low end of the federal scale.

And no restitution was ordered. None.

Restitution is money a court orders a defendant to pay back to the people he harmed. It requires an identified victim and an identified loss.

This was not for lack of trying. His plea agreement contains an unusually broad restitution clause. He agreed the court could order restitution beyond the crime he pleaded to. He agreed the government could present evidence of losses from all known conduct, charged or not. He agreed to disclose every asset he and his wife owned, under penalty of perjury, and to hand over tax returns and credit reports.

The government reserved every avenue available to it.

It collected nothing.

Amazon filed a victim impact statement. It told the court it had been harmed, that its selling partners had been harmed, that customers had been harmed. It asked for prison.

It received nothing. Not one dollar was ordered paid to Amazon. Not one dollar to any seller. Not one dollar to any customer.

The court imposed a $100,000 fine — payable to the United States Treasury, which is where fines go when there is no victim to compensate.

In a case announced to the world as a $100 million conspiracy, no identified person or company was ever found to have lost anything a court could order repaid. Six years on, no victim has ever come forward.

And by the end, the prosecution's own sentencing submission described the defendant it had spent three years pursuing:

Rosenberg operates a legitimate consulting business that has served many seller clients through legal means, with the conduct charged in this case constituting a significant aberration from those legal business activities.

That is the government of the United States, in its own filing, saying that the man it indicted as the centerpiece of a marketplace conspiracy runs a legitimate business, and that what it charged was an aberration from it.

Prosecutors do not write sentences like that about people they believe are guilty of what they charged.

Rosenberg's own position is that the conduct the government called an aberration looks different with the surrounding context restored — which turns even the aberration into something else.

There was no deal. He informed on no one.

When a federal defendant walks out of court without prison, there is usually one reason: he gave the government someone else.

Prosecutors can ask a judge to go below the normal sentence when a defendant provides substantial assistance — testimony or information used against other people. It is the most common route to a sentence with no prison time.

Ed Rosenberg's plea agreement contains no cooperation provisions. No substantial-assistance motion was ever filed. He testified against no one. He named no one.

He received probation anyway — recommended jointly, in writing, by the prosecutors who indicted him, four months before he was sentenced.

Meanwhile the government told the court that a different defendant, Joseph Nilsen, was the most culpable of the group, and described him as supplying the pipeline of illicit services to his own clients and to Rosenberg's.

The light sentence was not purchased. It was the government's own measure of what this actually was.

What it costs to defend yourself against a corporation and the government at the same time

In an ordinary federal case there are two sides. The government has the evidence, and the law requires it to give the defense a copy.

This case had a third party.

Almost everything in it — the account records, the internal notes, the employee emails — belonged to Amazon. Amazon was not a defendant. Amazon was not on trial. Amazon was the company that had reported him, and it owned the file.

So his lawyers could not simply ask the prosecutor for the evidence. They had to go through Amazon's lawyers. What was produced, when, and under what conditions all ran through the company that had started the case.

Every hour of that was billed.

Amazon's legal department is one of the largest in the world. Ed Rosenberg was paying by the hour, out of his own pocket, in installments.

He reports spending more than two million dollars on his defense, continuously, from the day of the indictment to the day of sentencing. The portion documented here covers four months and two of his three law firms: $154,267.50.

In June 2023 alone, nearly $42,000 of that went to drafting a single document — the memorandum asking the judge not to send him to prison. He was paying it down in pieces: $1,500, $3,000, $2,000, $5,000, whatever he had that week. A week before sentencing he still owed one firm $62,632.50.

His case ran two and a half years. Five times his lawyers signed agreements postponing it. Four times the deadline for filing motions was pushed back.

A motion is a formal request asking a judge to rule on something — to throw out evidence, to dismiss a charge, to force the government to explain itself. It is how a defendant fights back before trial.

Not one substantive motion was ever filed. Nothing challenging the search of his home. Nothing challenging the charges. The deadline to file them was extended four times and never used.

On 27 March 2023, his lawyers asked the court for one more extension.

Three days later he pleaded guilty. The request was withdrawn as moot. Rosenberg estimates that carrying the case all the way through a trial would have run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Why almost nobody fights

Federal judges sentence by a formula. Every offense gets a number, and the number sets the range of prison time.

One of the few things that lowers the number is called acceptance of responsibility. Admit what you did, and the formula moves down. For Rosenberg it moved from 16 to 13 — the difference between a range that starts in prison and one that allows probation.

So contrition is not only a moral question in a federal case. It is a term of the deal. And the government decides whether you have shown enough of it.

Almost nobody tests this. Roughly 90% of federal cases end in a guilty plea. Fewer than 3% ever reach a jury.

Arthur Andersen fought. The accounting firm was convicted, and it was destroyed — 28,000 jobs gone. Three years later the Supreme Court reversed the conviction unanimously. The vindication arrived after the firm no longer existed.

Ed Rosenberg has six children. He did the math — and guaranteed probation was what let him get his life back.

What Amazon's own contract says

Here is the world Ed Rosenberg was operating in, in Amazon's own words. From the Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement as it stood in March 2019:

We may terminate or suspend this Agreement or any Service for any reason at any time by notice to you.

For any reason. At any time. No obligation to say why.

The word appeal does not appear anywhere in that document.

Read that again. A seller with employees, a warehouse, and millions of dollars of inventory could be shut off from their entire livelihood — permanently — and Amazon owed them no explanation and offered them no hearing. Not a slow hearing. Not an inadequate hearing. None.

Read it — Business Solutions Agreement, archived 13 March 2019

Web capture of the Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement, archived by the Internet Archive on 13 March 2019. Scroll inside the panel to read the full agreement. Verify at web.archive.org

Then Amazon changed it

By the version archived on 1 December 2020, that sentence is gone.

Termination for convenience now requires thirty days' advance notice. A material breach now carries a seven-day cure period, which Amazon may shorten only where the breach exposes it to third-party liability. And Amazon now commits to stating a reason:

We will promptly notify you of any such termination or suspension via email or similar means including Seller Central, indicating the reason and any options to appeal, except where we have reason to believe that providing this information will hinder the investigation or prevention of deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, or will enable you to circumvent our safeguards.

Those changes came afterward. They are also an admission of what the earlier version was. Amazon rewrote the terms Ed Rosenberg's sellers had been living under — the ones that let it close a business for any reason, at any time, and say nothing.

And read the revised language closely, because three things survive it.

Amazon may still suspend or terminate immediately where it determines an account may be used for deceptive, fraudulent or illegal activity, or that a seller's use of the Services might harm other sellers, customers, or Amazon's own legitimate interests. Not that it has. That it might.

The duty to give reasons carries an exception Amazon applies on its own judgment, and the seller is not told when it has been applied.

And there is still no appeal. The agreement mentions "any options to appeal." It does not create one, define one, set a deadline for one, or promise a human being will read anything.

And the provisions letting Amazon withhold a seller's money were not changed at all. In both versions, Amazon may in its sole discretion withhold any payments to a seller for as long as it determines a risk persists — and may withhold them permanently where it determines an account has been used for deceptive, fraudulent or illegal activity, or to repeatedly violate its policies. Amazon rewrote how it ends a seller's business. It did not change what happens to the seller's money.

Read it — Business Solutions Agreement, archived 1 December 2020

Web capture of the Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement, archived by the Internet Archive on 1 December 2020. Scroll inside the panel to read the full agreement. Verify at web.archive.org

Both panels above are screenshots of Internet Archive web captures, not of Amazon's live site. Each links to the archive so any reader can confirm the text independently. Amazon's current agreement is published at Seller Central and has changed again since 2020.

This is the company that went to the Department of Justice about transparency.

The United States government says Amazon's sellers live in fear

Three years after Ed Rosenberg was indicted, the federal government filed its own case about how Amazon treats the people who sell on its marketplace.

In FTC v. Amazon.com, the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general allege that Amazon illegally maintains a monopoly. Buried at paragraph 258 is a description of what that means for a seller:

Amazon denies the allegations. In September 2024, Judge John H. Chun refused to dismiss any of the federal claims, holding they were sufficient to proceed. The case is headed to trial. Nothing has been proven.

But this much is on the public record: the United States government alleges that Amazon knew its sellers lived in fear of arbitrary suspension — and that Amazon's own researchers told the company so.

That is the marketplace the sellers who came to Ed Rosenberg were trying to get back into.

If Amazon has suspended your seller account

A lot of people reach this page looking for something else entirely: why Amazon suspended their seller account, how an Amazon suspension appeal actually works, why their funds are being withheld, or what "account health" means when nobody at Amazon will explain the decision. Here is the short and accurate answer, because it is the reason this case exists at all.

Under the Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement, Amazon can suspend or terminate a selling account, block a listing, and withhold a seller's money at its own discretion. The 2020 revision added notice and a stated reason, with exceptions Amazon decides for itself. It still creates no appeal — no deadline, no defined process, no guarantee a human being reads what you send back through Seller Central. And during the years covered by this case, the internal notes explaining why an account was suspended — Amazon's annotations — were not shown to the seller at all. Reinstatement meant guessing at the reason, in writing, repeatedly, while the inventory sat and the payroll came due.

That gap is the entire industry Ed Rosenberg was working in, and it is what the Justice Department prosecuted him out of. If you sell on Amazon, or used to, and a suspension took your business — or if you worked inside Amazon's seller performance, account health, or seller support teams in any year — we want to hear from you. We do not publish names without permission.

What Ed Rosenberg actually did

He built the thing Amazon wouldn't.

ASGTG — Amazon Sellers Group Telegram — grew from a WhatsApp group into the largest independent community of Amazon sellers in the world, with a Facebook group alone topping 83,000 members, known worldwide as the voice of the seller. Its stated mission was a White Hat pathway: follow the rules, use official channels, don't touch the black-market consultants selling sabotage and forged documents.

White Hat means playing by the rules. Black Hat means cheating — bribes, forgeries, sabotaging competitors. The seller community uses these terms constantly. ASGTG's entire identity was built on the first one.

He ran a paid consulting practice, the way any consultant does. But the escalations were different.

When a legitimate seller had exhausted every appeal Amazon offered and still had no answer, Rosenberg would review the file and send it to Amazon executives who had known him for years. They did not reinstate accounts. They told the right team to look again. Amazon made every decision.

He did roughly 1,200 of these.

He never charged for a single one — specifically so no one could claim access to Amazon's leadership was for sale.

Amazon executives attended his events. He was invited to Amazon's Seattle headquarters more than once. He organized the #WorkWithUsAmazon petition, which drew more than 12,500 signatures and forced direct engagement with Amazon leadership.

He was the most effective organized voice sellers had ever had. And he was aimed squarely at Amazon's suspension practices.

Then he was indicted.

Three doors

Between 2016 and 2020, a legitimate American business wrongly suspended by Amazon had three options.

The three links below are Ed Rosenberg's own writing about each door, published on his blog. They are his account, not this page's.

Door one: shut down. Fire the employees. Liquidate the inventory. Go bankrupt. Sellers took this door constantly — a ten-year seller destroyed over an authentic Adidas replica ball that an algorithm read as counterfeit, a seven-dollar item; a business owner facing the layoff of nine employees; a seller in China who knelt in front of a camera holding hand-lettered signs begging for her money back after 576 days.

Some sellers did not survive it. ASGTG's inboxes carried messages from people describing suicidal despair after losing everything to an automated decision no human had reviewed. Rosenberg answered them personally. To one, he wrote: Amazon doesn't decide your worth.

Door one, in Ed Rosenberg's words: the sellers who didn't survive it →

Door two: hire a black hat. Thousands of illicit consultants sold insider reinstatements — real bribes, forged documents, sabotage of competitors, corrupted Amazon employees. Before ASGTG, this was the most common route a desperate seller took, and it built an entire underground industry.

Door two, in his words: what the black hat market actually looked like →

Door three: ASGTG. Bring the case to Ed Rosenberg, who would vet it and — if it held up — put it in front of Amazon executives who would decide on the merits.

Door three, in his words: escalation, insider reinstatement, and abuse of the system →

Door three existed because Rosenberg built it. Every seller who walked through it was a seller who did not walk through door two.

That is what the Department of Justice prosecuted.

The sellers, in their own words

ASGTG's public Facebook page carries 124 seller recommendations. Every one is positive. Each is attached to a real, named Facebook profile.

Eighty-seven were posted before the September 2020 indictment.

Then they stopped. For nearly five months after the Justice Department announced a $100 million conspiracy, not one seller posted. The last review before the indictment was 10 August 2020. The next was 8 January 2021.

Then they started again, and they never stopped. Twenty-two recommendations have been posted since the indictment — twelve in 2021 alone, and seven after Rosenberg pleaded guilty in March 2023. The most recent is dated 19 November 2025.

Amazon's own people, in writing

While the government says Ed Rosenberg was running a conspiracy against Amazon, Amazon's own employees were writing to him. These messages are dated inside the period the indictment covers.

In January 2018, an Amazon employee wrote to thank him for advocating for sellers and acknowledged he assists sellers with account concerns.

In October 2018, another wrote that he was one of the few seller group managers who really understood the approach to selling on Amazon, and committed to doing everything in their power to support a seller's reinstatement.

In January 2019, an Amazon representative relayed a message from the account-health team: they think well of your work, and asked me to send you a response.

Also in 2018, an Amazon Global Fulfillment Services manager wrote that they had heard great things about what he and his groups do for Amazon sellers, and asked for fifteen minutes of his time to understand what sellers needed.

And an Amazon account health representative wrote that his work had generated quite the buzz, that they would love to support it in a more organized capacity the following year, and that they were advocating internally for exactly that.

Amazon's employees were asking to work with him. Amazon's lawyers asked a federal judge to put him in prison.

They also appeared in person. Amazon staff attended ASGTG events, and Rosenberg hosted a senior Amazon representative on stage:

What sellers said when the indictment came

The people who knew the industry read the charges and said so publicly, under their own names.

More sellers, in their own words →

The charge of last resort

There is no federal law against commercial bribery. Paying someone at a private company to break their employer's rules is not a federal crime in the United States. Congress never made one.

So prosecutors borrow.

The Travel Act, passed in 1961 to chase mobsters across state lines, lets the federal government take a state offense and convert it into a federal felony — as long as the defendant used a "facility of interstate commerce." In 1961 that meant crossing a state line. Today it means sending an email.

A predicate is the underlying state crime that a federal charge is built on top of. Here the predicate was commercial bribery under New York and California law. Neither state charged him. The federal government used their laws anyway.

Legal commentators describe this plainly: it is, in one law firm's words, a federalization of state law. The jury sits in a federal courthouse and is instructed on the elements of a state crime. When the Supreme Court narrowed the honest-services fraud statute that prosecutors had previously used to fill this gap, the Travel Act became the replacement — the fallback when the statute actually designed for the conduct doesn't fit.

Scholars warned about this before it became routine, cautioning that a broad reading would turn state misdemeanors into federal felonies and pull federal police power into matters Congress never assigned it. The Supreme Court approved the broad reading in 1979, over the argument that Congress had meant something narrower.

That is the law under which Ed Rosenberg was convicted. Not a federal crime. A state offense, federalized by an email.

Strip it down and the case looks like this: a private company's internal employment rules, converted into a state offense, converted into a federal felony because a message traveled over a wire. No federal program was defrauded. No public money was taken. No government agency was deceived. No federal victim existed at all — which is precisely why no restitution was ordered.

Amazon could have sued. Amazon could have closed accounts, which it does routinely and without explanation. Amazon could have fired the employees, which it did.

Instead it went to the Department of Justice. And the Department of Justice went to Ed Rosenberg's house at dawn — before anyone had ever asked him a question.

Amazon played every role

Amazon wrote the rules. Amazon decided they had been broken. Amazon investigated. Amazon referred the matter to the FBI and, in its own words, actively supported the investigation. Amazon supplied the evidence.

And at sentencing, Amazon came back one more time — as the victim, filing a statement that urged the court to reject the government's own recommendation and put Ed Rosenberg in prison.

Detector. Investigator. Referrer. Witness. Victim.

Five roles, one company, and not once did it have to defend its version of events under oath or face a single question on cross-examination. That burden fell entirely on the man it accused.

Ten employees. One charged. Nobody else, ever.

The indictment alleges bribes were paid to at least ten Amazon employees and contractors.

One was charged: Nishad Kunju, who was in Hyderabad, India. He was never arraigned. He remains a fugitive.

The other nine have never been publicly charged with anything.

This matters more than it may appear. Under the Travel Act, commercial bribery turns on a breach of the duty an employee owes an employer. Ed Rosenberg owed Amazon no such duty. He was not an Amazon employee. He had signed nothing promising Amazon his loyalty.

The people who did owe that duty — and who the indictment says broke it — were not prosecuted. The man who owed Amazon nothing was.

Nor did it stop. In August 2023 — one month after Rosenberg was sentenced — CNBC reported on a Telegram channel called "Amazon Magic," operating openly with more than 13,000 members, charging sellers $200 to $400 to remove negative reviews, recover suspended accounts, and leak competitor data by paying Amazon employees.

No one has been charged.

What he actually paid for

The annotations were not secrets. They were sold openly — on Reddit, in Facebook groups, on public seller forums — commonly for around $50. Sellers used them. Consultants used them. Attorneys used them. Amazon suspended no one for using them, and today Amazon shows sellers the same information itself.

Most of the annotations attributed to Ed Rosenberg came to him from the sellers he was helping. They had already obtained them. They handed them over as part of their own case files, the way a client hands a lawyer their paperwork.

And there was a reason he needed them. By his own estimate, roughly half the sellers who came to him claiming innocence were not telling the truth — operating duplicate storefronts, hiding prior enforcement, running the schemes they claimed they hadn't. He was asking senior Amazon executives to spend their time on cases he vouched for. The notes were how he told the honest sellers from the liars before he put his own credibility behind them.

In other words: the information the government charged him for obtaining was the information he used to keep fraudulent cases away from Amazon.

And this is the part that should stop anyone reading it: the standard applied to him would have implicated the entire industry.

If obtaining an annotation is a federal felony, then every seller who bought one is a felon. Every consultant who worked a suspension case is a felon. Every attorney who used one to draft an appeal is a felon. Thousands of people, over years, doing the ordinary work of getting wrongly closed businesses reopened.

None of them were charged. The sellers who obtained the notes were not charged. The websites selling them were not charged. Ed Rosenberg was.

A rule that would convict an entire community, enforced against exactly one man — the one who had organized that community and turned it into a public voice against the company that made the referral.

The court said no

Amazon asked for prison. It argued the joint recommendation of the government and the defense was too lenient. It told the court that a term of incarceration was fair, just, and equitable.

The Department of Justice — the party that had indicted him, that had spent years investigating him, that had every institutional reason to want a hard sentence for its lead defendant — recommended no prison. So did the Probation Office, which answers to no one but the court.

Judge Richard A. Jones imposed probation.

He imposed something else, too — nothing. Federal sentencing guidelines let a judge bar a defendant from the very occupation used to commit an offense. The tool was available and it fit: the government's theory was that Ed Rosenberg's consulting business was the vehicle for the crime. No such restriction was imposed. He left that courtroom free to keep advising Amazon sellers and free to keep running ASGTG, and that is exactly what he has done ever since.

Amazon lost that argument. It lost it to the prosecutors it had brought the case to.

When a company insists a man belongs behind bars and the government prosecuting him says otherwise, that tells you which account of the facts survived contact with the evidence.

The headline is permanent. The correction never came.

The Justice Department publishes when it charges. It does not publish when the case falls apart.

In September 2020 it announced a conspiracy worth more than $100 million, with Ed Rosenberg named first. In July 2023 it announced that he had purchased forged supplier documents.

Those two announcements are the first things anyone finds when they search his name. His children's classmates find them. Every bank, every insurer, every business contact finds them.

What followed appears in no press release anywhere:

Six of seven counts dismissed. One count of conviction. A guidelines bribe value between $95,000 and $150,000. No prison. No restitution. No identified victim. No occupational restriction. A prosecution filing describing his business as legitimate and the conduct as an aberration from it. And a forged-documents allegation that appears in neither his plea nor his apology, attributed by the Department itself to someone else.

The Department of Justice corrected none of it. It never does.

Ed Rosenberg completed his sentence in full — two years of probation, twelve months of home confinement, a $100,000 fine paid, no violations. During probation he had to ask a federal judge for permission to spend a single night away from home. He asked. He was granted it. He complied with everything.

What remains was imposed by no judge. His bank accounts were closed and he had to open new ones. An application for life insurance was denied. He is inadmissible to Canada — barred from entering — because of a foreign conviction.

These are called collateral consequences: the restrictions that attach automatically to a criminal record, outside any sentence a judge hands down. A federally funded national inventory has catalogued more than 44,000 of them.

A presidential pardon removes them. Nothing else does.

What he did with it

Ed Rosenberg believes what happened to him was a serious injustice. He has never taken back his apology, and he does not take it back now. He admitted what he did. He served every day of what he was given.

But he could not accept that the gap between the headline and the record was simply the way things work.

So he went looking for other people it had happened to. He found them, and he started writing their cases down — the documents, the dockets, the numbers, the same way he had once worked a suspended seller's file. That work became 43 Americans, and it became this website.

Ed Rosenberg is Case No. 1 of the 43 Americans. He documented the other forty-two.

The man the Justice Department announced as the centerpiece of a $100 million conspiracy spent the years after his conviction building a public record of other people's cases.

What's left

No seller has come forward saying Ed Rosenberg victimized them.

No account he escalated was suspended because of anything he did.

No victim was ever identified. No restitution was ever ordered. No cooperation was ever given.

The conspiracy became annotations. The prison sentence became probation, recommended by the prosecutors themselves. The $100 million became a $100,000 fine paid to the Treasury, because there was nobody to repay.

What remains is a man whose name was destroyed worldwide, who was debanked, whose wife and children watched federal agents carry the family's computers out of their home, and who spent more than two million dollars defending himself against a case the government itself described as an aberration from an otherwise legitimate business.

He still runs ASGTG. It has grown since the indictment. The sellers who know this industry read the charges and did not recognize the man in them — and they are still saying so, publicly, by name, five years later.

What this page does not claim

Nothing that happened here required an Amazon account

Take Amazon out of it. What is left is machinery — and every part of it is sitting in every federal district in the country.

Read it and ask which parts could not reach you.

1. A private company's rules can become a federal felony. There is no federal law against commercial bribery. The Travel Act borrows a state offense, and an email supplies the federal hook. The rules you are prosecuted for breaking do not have to be written by a government.
2. The number in the announcement is not the number in the case. A press release said $100 million. The guidelines put the bribes between $95,000 and $150,000, across six people, over three years. The announcement is written before anything is tested. Nobody publishes the revision.
3. The company that reported you owns the evidence. It is not a party. It is not on trial. It has no obligation to hand anything over on your schedule. Your lawyers bill for every hour of asking, and the company's lawyers do not.
4. The people who owed a duty may not be the people charged. Commercial bribery is a breach of an employee's duty to an employer. Ten employees were alleged to have taken payments. One was charged, and never arrested. The man who owed Amazon nothing was prosecuted.
5. Contrition has a price, and the government sets it. Admitting the offense takes three levels off the sentencing formula. That is often the difference between prison and probation. Whether you have shown enough of it is not your call.
6. The deadline to fight expires because you cannot afford to meet it. The motions deadline in this case was extended four times and never used. Three days after the last request for more time, the case ended in a plea. Not one challenge to the search or the charges was ever filed.
7. The record can clear you and the headline stays. No prison. No restitution. No identified victim. No occupational restriction. A prosecution filing calling the business legitimate. None of it was ever announced, and the original announcement is still the first thing anyone finds.

None of that is specific to selling on Amazon. It is specific to being charged.

A contractor who paid a supplier's employee for a price list. A recruiter who bought a competitor's org chart. A freight broker who paid for routing data. A consultant in any industry who bought information that turned out to be internal, in a market where everyone was buying it. Anyone whose business depends on a single platform that can close their account without explanation, and who pays someone to find out why.

This page is not claiming an innocent man was picked at random. Ephraim Rosenberg paid for information he should not have paid for. He said so publicly before he was sentenced, and he pleaded guilty. The claim is narrower and harder: not one item on that list turns on how serious the conduct was, or on whether it was ever proven. Every one of them attaches the moment the government decides to charge you, and they keep working whether the case is strong, weak, or never tested at all.

He is one man in Brooklyn. The machinery that produced this is federal, and it is everywhere. That is why there are forty-three of these pages and not one.

The askNot mercy. Correction.

He is not asking to be let out of anything. There is nothing left to be let out of.

Two years of probation, served. Twelve months of home confinement, served. A $100,000 fine, paid. No violations. During probation he asked a federal judge for permission to spend one night away from home, and waited for the order.

He is not asking a court to undo the conviction either. He gave up the right to appeal as part of the bargain, and he has never taken back what he admitted.

What is wrong here was never in a court's judgment. It was in a press release.

A $100 million conspiracy. Forged supplier documents. Neither appears in the count he pleaded to. Neither appears in the apology he published. One of them the indictment defines as other people's sales revenue; the other the Justice Department attributed to a different defendant by name.

No court can fix that, because no court ever said it. The Department that said it does not issue corrections. And the conviction it sits on top of keeps working — on his bank accounts, on his insurance applications, on his ability to cross a border, on what his children find when they search their own last name.

One office in the country can answer a permanent government statement with a stronger one.

Six of seven counts dismissed. Ten Amazon employees alleged to have taken payments; one charged, never arrested. An identical market operating openly today, uncharged. No victim in six years. Not one dollar of restitution. No cooperation, and no one informed on. Two million dollars spent, and not a single motion filed.

Ephraim "Ed" Rosenberg is asking for a presidential pardon.

Follow 43 Americans on Facebook for the other forty-two cases.

The full story, in his own words

Sources: United States v. Rosenberg, No. 2:20-cr-00151 (W.D. Wash.), Hon. Richard A. Jones — indictment (Dkt. 1), plea agreement (Dkt. 182), government sentencing submission (Dkt. 195), defense sentencing memorandum (Dkt. 196), victim impact statement, judgment (Dkt. 199), and docket. U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Office, W.D. Wash., press releases of 18 September 2020 and 14 July 2023. FTC v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 2:23-cv-01495-JHC (W.D. Wash.), Second Amended Complaint (Dkt. 327, 31 October 2024) and Order on Motion to Dismiss (Dkt. 289, 30 September 2024). Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement, Internet Archive captures of 13 March 2019 (web/20190313040141) and 1 December 2020 (web/20201201211127), reproduced on this page as screenshots of those captures. ASGTG Facebook page, seller recommendations, captured 2026. Attorney invoices, Skellenger Bender and Jacob Laufer, P.C. Annie Palmer, CNBC, 18 September 2020 and 1 August 2023. Ina Steiner, "Amazon Bribery Plea: One Count, Possibility of No Jail Time," EcommerceBytes, 30 March 2023. On the Travel Act: Perrin v. United States, 444 U.S. 37 (1979); Quarles & Brady, "The Travel Act in Federal Health Care Fraud Prosecutions"; NYU School of Law, Compliance and Enforcement, "Confronting Percoco and Full Play" (11 September 2024). On the standard applied in the weaponization analysis: Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935); DOJ, Justice Manual 1-7.000. U.S. Sentencing Commission, annual sourcebook. National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction.