Binh Thanh Import Export Production & Trade Joint Stock Co. (Gilimex) v. Amazon.com Services LLC, No. 23 Civ. 292 (LGS), S.D.N.Y. (July 9, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
A Vietnamese supplier sued Amazon for $840 million, then built the damages claim at the center of the case on documents it had fabricated. In Gilimex v. Amazon, the Southern District of New York dismissed the entire case with prejudice as a sanction for fraud on the court. The fraud was proven the way document fabrication usually surfaces now, through metadata. File-creation dates and print-to-PDF signatures showed that purchase orders the plaintiff swore were scanned paper originals had instead been generated from Excel two days before they were produced. Fabricated evidence rarely survives a forensic examiner, and the cost of trying can be the whole case.
What happened
Gilimex, a Vietnamese manufacturer, claimed Amazon left it holding more than $68 million in raw materials after ending their supply relationship. In discovery, Gilimex produced sixty-six purchase orders and demand letters reflecting roughly $69 million in purchases. Many of those documents had been created on July 31, 2023, two days before production, and a forensic expert later testified they had been made by printing Excel files to PDF rather than scanned from paper. The underlying Excel files and their metadata were never produced. After fact discovery closed, Gilimex produced for the first time a single November 2021 purchase order for about $69 million from a supplier owned by its chairman's sister-in-law, and its damages expert relied on that document instead of the ones produced earlier.
The court's analysis
A court may sanction a litigant under its inherent power on clear and convincing evidence that a party "set in motion some unconscionable scheme calculated to interfere with the judicial system's ability impartially to adjudicate the action." The court found three fabrications: ninety supplier documents Gilimex admitted were fake, a false story told to excuse them, and the November purchase order. A digital forensics expert testified that at least thirty-six of the disputed documents "were created on July 31, 2023, and had file extensions in their title metadata," meaning they were generated with Excel's print-to-PDF function rather than scanned from paper. The court found that Gilimex's answer, that it had photographed hard copies, converted the images to Excel, and then printed them back to PDF, "strains credulity."
The court found it "incredible on its face" that a low-level employee earning about $373 a month would devise a $40 million fabrication scheme. The inquiry in any event turns on "the intent of the potentially sanctionable conduct, not on its effect," so the fact that Gilimex produced the documents in response to Amazon's discovery requests was enough. Forensic analysis of the company "chops," the inked seals used to certify authenticity, showed that seals which should have been unique were identical across two documents, while seals that should have matched were made from different stamps. The $69 million order appeared nowhere in Gilimex's inventory logs, financial statements, or contemporaneous emails, and Gilimex refused to let Amazon's expert ink-date the paper. Each time its account was tested, Gilimex changed the story.
Why it matters
The court dismissed the entire case, not only the tainted damages claim, because the remaining claims could not be cleanly separated from the fabricated proof. It walked through the lesser sanctions and explained why each fell short. Excluding the fabricated exhibits would remove documents but not the credibility problem, because any trial would still turn on the same witnesses who authenticated the fakes. An adverse inference would leave the trial "consumed by the authenticity and credibility disputes caused by Gilimex's fraud," striking only the raw-materials claim "would understate the seriousness of the repeated fabrication and cover-up," and fees alone would not "restore the integrity of a proceeding that still depends on tainted witnesses." Only dismissal with prejudice fit the scope of the misconduct.
Metadata is the first place fabrication shows itself, which is why native files and the metadata that travels with them are not a technicality to bargain away. The missing Excel files, and the print-to-PDF fingerprints on the PDFs that were produced, are what unraveled the story here. A company also cannot outrun its own production by pinning the forgery on an employee. Gilimex produced the documents in discovery and vouched for them in sworn declarations, and that, not the identity of the forger, was what mattered.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
