The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges that Amazon uses a variety of illegal practices to stay ahead of online retailers while increasing purchase prices and extracting more money from consumers by acting as independent salespeople.

The FTC accuses Amazon of deliberately understating costs by more than $1 billion through a secretive process called Project Ness.

The $1 trillion company monitors its sellers and fines them if they offer lower prices to other platforms.

The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against the company in September, but most of the details were not made public until this week, when a lesser-known lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

Newly released documents shed light on the FTC's claim that Amazon used its monopoly power to take advantage of the interplay of competition and unfair tactics.

Amazon created a secret internal process, codenamed Project Ness, to identify specific products that it predicted other online stores would follow Amazon's lead in increasing prices. Amazon used the Loch Ness ghost project to extract more than $1 billion directly from American wallets.

Amazon still requires sellers on the company's Prime feature to use its fulfillment and delivery services, but many advertisers are opting to use services that are cheaper or can help customers on other platforms where they sell.

The FTC says Amazon began using Nessie in 2014 and used it to set prices, which by 2018 had been viewed more than 400 million times by shoppers. The complaint alleges that Amazon used it to charge more than 8 million items purchased by customers in April 2018, with a total value of approximately $194 million, before suspending it in 2019.