Fake Amazon Reviews 'Being Sold in Bulk' Online (bbc.com) 91
Fake reviews for products sold on Amazon's Marketplace are being sold online "in bulk", according to Which? The consumer group found 10 websites selling fake reviews from $7 each and incentivising positive reviews in exchange for payment or free products. From a report: It suggested the firm was facing an "uphill struggle" against a "widespread fake reviews industry". An Amazon spokesman said: "We remove fake reviews and take action against anyone involved in abuse." The retail giant's Marketplace allows other retailers to sell their goods via the Amazon website. Which? identified websites offering review services for goods for sale on Amazon Marketplace that violated the firm's terms and conditions. These included "packages" of fake reviews available for sellers to buy for about $21 individually, as well as bulk packages starting at $862 for 50 reviews and going up to $11,130 for 1,000. The group also suggested that five of the businesses it looked at had more than 702,000 "product reviewers" on their books. Product reviewers are offered small payments ranging from a few pounds up to more than $14, alongside free or discounted products. They can even take part in "loyalty schemes" and earn themselves premium goods, from children's toys to exercise equipment.
Re: (Score:2)
Coincidentally, all of the above also take the *other* funny money, the US dollar.
Re: On the bright side (Score:3)
Actual currency has tons of uses unlike the cryptocurrency toys.
Although, I would like to see you arrange a payment to a ransomware threat actor with a sack of cash.
Excelent article, will buy again A+++ (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but did you get the ones that are helium-filled and gravity-fed? And was the cable sheathing rolled by hand under a dim light by little old Italian widows listening to Verdi?
If not, you may want to upgrade.
Re: (Score:2)
And once they get a good review, they'll raise the price until it's no longer such a good deal, but the seller still gets to keep the good reviews even though the price hike invalidates them.
As a buyer, what I really want to know is, if this and a competing product were the same price, which would the reviewer choose?
Re:Excelent article, will buy again A+++ (Score:4, Informative)
I've seen them switch products after the reviews are good. And when you read the review, it has nothing to do with the product you are looking at.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
This 'market' will eventually fail... (Score:4, Interesting)
... but before it does, it will render Amazon's reviews system completely moot.
Heck, they already *are* completely pointless.
But Amazon doesn't care, which is why this perpetuates.
The reason it will eventually fail, is through word of mouth - it has been common knowledge, amongst the more technically inclined, for a considerable amount of time, that you cannot trust Amazon reviews, or in fact, most review sites for that matter.
That word is slowly spreading to the less technically included.
It's also pretty obvious that if you get burned a few times by products that received 5 star reviews, that turned out to be garbage, the trust levels will go down.
Sure, people will always fall for a bargain - falling foul of "buy cheap, buy twice", but quite often, these fake reviews are for products that are cheaply constructed, but are not actually cheap to buy. Basically, product scamming - fakes, cheap copies, rebranded shit.
But there's a point where this will level off and Amazon reviews will just simply backfire. When there's zero trust.
There's a few ways to be sure about a product.
1. Always read the 1 and 3 star reviews - use your brains to smell the BS.
2. Research a product on multiple review sites
The word is getting out pretty fast now that Amazon reviews are not to be trusted and that will become a big problem for Amazon eventually.
Right now, they don't give a shit, because it's more bucks for them.
Re:This 'market' will eventually fail... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Always read the 1 and 3 star reviews - use your brains to smell the BS.
1 star reviews can also be unreliable. It is common practice for vendors to pay for fake negative reviews for competitors' products.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
And 3 star reviews are unreliable as well. It's always:
A) This product worked 100% and met every expectation at a great price. Three stars.
B) This is the worst thing I ever purchased, I think it may have given me cancer. Three stars.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
"Package came 2 days late because of the blizzard! 1-star!!1!"
Re: (Score:2)
The ONLY help can come from government crackdown (Score:2, Insightful)
Amazon does not really want to fix it (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. And Amazon does not really want to fix the issue. They could if they wanted to, but they just won't do anything about it, even when you report blatant violations and that's from personal experience of a fake reviewer ring ganging up on me.
A while ago I bought some of the "top selling" binoculars from Amazon.co.uk because they looked shady and as I am quite familiar with scopes and binos I did some thorough and rather technical reviews [ecuadors.net]. I was a top-500 reviewer at the time and the reviews appeared near the top. The result was that the sellers messaged me to warn me they are "reporting my account as of a malicious rival", they left comments accusing me of being the owner of "rival store Agena Astro" (that was bizarre - that's a large and very reputable US astro retailer to which I have no affiliation), and then my reviews started getting dozens of downvotes daily (it was possible then) until my reviews disappeared from the front page. Then, I got a message from someone with screenshots from a facebook group where the seller had users whom they paid and/or gave free products to, asking to downvote all my reviews. The guy told me he was in that group to get free products, but when he saw that message and looked up my profile he just could not do it and contacted me instead. I forwarded all the screenshots to Amazon, even though it should have been obvious that a group of users mass downvoting specific reviews is not something legitimate, and Amazon thanked me and did nothing. From a top-500 reviewer I fell well below top-1000, while the "best seller" garbage binoculars stayed on with glowing clueless or fake reviews visible. My profile did not recover even after the downvote feature was removed, the mass downvotes are permanent.
I have been a Prime member for over a decade and buy most online things from Amazon (not blindly, I do look around), but I miss the days when I could rely on Amazon reviews for purchases, or when the searches either returned good products or no products, not a sea of crap you have to navigate through...
Re: (Score:3)
Wherever there is trust, there is incentive to lie.
And when the liars believe they can get away with it, they lie in abundance.
Wikipedia falls into that category too.
And so does anything any politician ever says.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup. And Amazon does not really want to fix the issue. They could if they wanted to, but they just won't do anything about it, even when you report blatant violations and that's from personal experience of a fake reviewer ring ganging up on me.
Ah, don't you just miss the days when a gang would just beat the shit out of you and get it over with? Now it's like the crazy class-5 clinger ex-girlfriend who should have been institutionalized.
I've called this behavior Corporate Arrogance for quite a while now. And yeah, it's going to get worse. A lot worse.
Amazon might as well have said Fuck You and Have a Nice Day, since they didn't do jack shit about your problem. And of course if you want any kind of guarantee that you're buying the genuine auth
Re: (Score:2)
Amazon still has the best shipping & returns policies so I still use them quite a bit, just avoid 3rd party sellers, except manufacturers - "going to the manufacturer" quite often means ordering from Amazon. And I have to confess, they have helped me when the manufacturer (ahem, Samsung) would not, saving me quite a lot of hassle and money. Yes, there's the stories of stock commingling, but I don't buy things that could be counterfeit without me noticing anyway (in which case - easy returns).
But I can n
Re: (Score:3)
Part of the problem is that when you look for something you get 500 nearly-identical products sold under 500 different names (most of whom are, of course, a single seller).
It's just page after page of the same exact plastic shit, just molded with different colors.
They look spot-on like better, higher-quality products, but the good ones are swamped and pushed to page 29 by all the knockoffs.
And then there are the sellers who sell counterfeits of the knockoffs. Oy.
Re: (Score:2)
What this tells me (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that Amazon is a willing participant in fraudulent activity.
It hosts the reviews as well as the products. It gets paid coming and going. Yet instead of disabling reviews, initiating some kind of moderation system internally, or using even the most basic of controls, it throws up it's hands and ask for someone else to solve the problem. And you can tell it's complicit because Amazon owns other third party review sites (Goodreads) which are fully integrated into their own sales.
Amazon needs to get hit with the monopoly stick, hard. It needs to be curbed and brought to heel.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Amazon needs to get hit with the monopoly stick
Amazon has 6% of retail sales in America.
Re: (Score:2)
"Amazon has 6% of retail sales in America."
Its ~50% of all ecommerce in America.
In 2018, Amazonâ(TM)s share of the US ecommerce market hit 49%. Thatâ(TM)s 5% of all retail spent across the entire country.
https://www.bigcommerce.com/bl... [bigcommerce.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Its ~50% of all ecommerce in America.
Ecommerce is a channel, not a market. If Amazon raises their prices, consumers can drive to Walmart.
Re: (Score:2)
a) your original stat for "all retail" isn't a market either. If amazon sell 95% of all books, it'll still only be 5% of all retail.
b) control of a channel can be just as anti-consumer as direct control of a market; and can lead to the ability to abuse markets.
from the same link as earlier. 20% of all Americans look products up on amazon to make a purchasing decision; that includes offline product purchases.
90% of Americans who find a product online somewhere also look it up on amazon.
Amazon has outsized in
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see what the big deal with Standard Oil is anyway. I tried it, and my horses wouldn't touch the stuff. 1 Star.
Re: (Score:1)
Amazon is a complete fraud. You got this, and counterfeit goods, you name it, they're doing it. You don't become a trillion dollar company any other way, not that quantitative easing doesn't help. *cough* Apple
If twitter & facebook are liable ... (Score:2)
for fake news, etc, that appears on their sites then amazon should also have liability for fake reviews. I know that Amazon just wants to sell stuff and get its cut but it should have liability. What would happen if a bricks & mortar shop was to start selling hyped goods ?
In the UK these should be caught by our Advertising Standards Authority [asa.org.uk]
Re: (Score:2)
nothing new (Score:2)
Fake reviews are nothing new. Amazon reviews have been garbage for a long time.
Goodhart's law (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but not all that helpful, since the only point of a metric is to be used as a target, sooner or later, directly or indirectly.
AFAIK, the purpose of a metric is to understand something quantitatively. Metrics are only convenient proxies for what's happening in a broader (complex adaptive) system. When you change that system to change the proxy metric, you also change the system but not necessarily in ways that are desirable or meet the objectives that you intend. That's the whole point of Goodhart's law.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Can I buy them on Amazon? (Score:3)
I've had aa few of those offers of gift cardx (Score:2)
Re:I've had aa few of those offers of gift cardx (Score:5, Funny)
Was one of those products a keyboard?
Re: (Score:2)
Was one of those products a keyboard?
No. And the product cost less than the gift card. I'm not sure what was the incentive for the seller as the product was laareaady highly rated and a brand name.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: I've had aa few of those offers of gift cardx (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I get these all the damn time. I usually forward them to the Amazon fraud dept.
For $5 / review ... (Score:2)
Heck, for just $5 / review, I'll gladly "review" your product. Just send me some "box opening" pics, features you want called out, and some Chinese cabbage seeds or whatever. I could knock out like 200 reviews / hour easy!
Totally unrelated note - does anyone know how to get SimpleNLG [github.com] on a "free" AWS instance? Asking for a friend.
That's why (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If the product is just garbage it deserves one star. By automatically discounting those you're making yourself vulnerable to the worst crap.
Re: (Score:2)
I mostly agree. The 5 stars are more likely fake or a moron who wrote a review 5 minutes after opening the box. The 1 stars are more likely from morons that didn't read the product description before they purchased.
But once in a while there is an honest 1 star review from someone who knows their sh*t and has been using the product for a while. And those reviews are worth the time of reading the 1 star reviews.
If I ran the Amazon reviews, I would not accept any review except for verified purchases made 6 m
Re: (Score:2)
I review almost everything I buy on Amazon, and I rarely give 5-star reviews. Maybe 5% of the stuff at most.
When I see a 90% 5-star rating, I'm skeptical.
It's about the same for 1-star reviews. I don't give them out often but when I do it means the product is pure shit.
Another missed opportunity for Amazon (Score:3)
They could have been selling bulk "Fake" reviews for years.
Think of the lost income.
Re: (Score:2)
They could have been selling bulk "Fake" reviews for years.
Think of the lost income.
Most websites allow review removing to subscribers. I once paid almost $1,000 subscription fee to remove some reviews so it’s probably pretty profitable. It was for me at least, going from a high 3 to a high 4 out of 5 can make a big difference. Even ebay allows “good” sellers to remove a certain number of bad reviews within a certain time period as long as they remain “good” sellers.
Amazon is only interested in selling crap (Score:2)
Half of amazons goal is to sell cheap products that don't work, take for example their amazons basics line, which is low tier rebranded Chinese products. They know that if it breaks you'll buy a better one, and then they get two sales instead of one.
I don't even check reviews anymore, there should be trusted reviews, having people that haven't even bought a product review them is stupid.
Do yourself a favor and ditch amazon prime, you'll save money and you don't need the convenience
As opposed to what? "Real" ones? (Score:1)
What good is a real human's review, unless know that person and how her preferences align with yours?
Plenty of people have completely different preferences than you and me. Aside from them not being experts, and revievs always ignoing the long-term performance.
E.g. any review of a non-perishable before having used it for two years, is equivalent to fake. And food should have been consumed.
How real is such a person anyway? How real am I to you right now? As opposed to useless fairy tale characters.
We delude
What everyone *really* wants to know (Score:1)
Fake will never stop. (Score:2)
Lot of scum out there (Score:1)
Ahh... the free market of fake reviews. (Score:3)
I know something of this world ... lots of people in developing countries make a living by chasing people in 1st world countries to buy products, review them, and get them for free. The middle-men (or women, but they're all fake profiles) pocket them couple bucks per review they can get done.
It's a mess, it's extremely blatant in most cases, and even applies to better known products Ravpower comes to mind as an example...even though they do have a decent product. I wouldn't be shocked to hear Aukey and Anker had done the same thing earlier to build up their brands.
There's tons of FB groups, whatsapp groups, messenger, etc. focused on this along with an endless stream of people speaking broken English that have zero reservations about sending endless friend requests and messages begging you to buy whatever stuff they're trying to get reviews on.
Easy fix (Score:3)
This is easy to fix: Amazon just needs to publish the stats of how many items were shipped at each price, and how many were returned.
While we're wishing for things we won't get, I'd also love it if Amazon had a "time machine" feature so you could see a listing as it was published at a specific time... because the part of review stuffing that bothers me the most is actually when they change the product photos and description and price, basically making a whole new listing, but using the original listing URL/ID, to pump crappy products using really good reviews from essentially unrelated products.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That wouldn't work for things like USB cables and phone chargers, because most folks aren't going to take the time to request a refund for a defective $15 item.
Things like USB cables and phone chargers are usually the items with the most fake reviews, too, because manufacturers are willing to give them away in exchange for a favorable review.
Re: (Score:2)
This is easy to fix: Amazon just needs to publish the stats of how many items were shipped at each price, and how many were returned.
That's a great idea. Publishing the return rate would be an extremely valuable metric. (Until they start messing with it, that is.)
I'd love to see a line on each page with something like, "22% of buyers returned this item."
Why doesn't Amazon limit reviews to verified... (Score:3)
....buyers?
Maybe the first few years when Amazon was trying to get established, maybe it made sense to have reviews for things people had bought elsewhere. Both to promote site engagement and to get reviews established.
But now? I don't see the percentage for them, especially how badly the review system is being exploited for fraud. The challenge might be people buying an item, leaving a review, and then returning an item, but this is mostly normal for negative type reviews.
The thing I can't wrap my head around is why they would want to tolerate a useless and exploited review system?
Re:Why doesn't Amazon limit reviews to verified... (Score:5, Informative)
This type of fake review *is* using verified buyers. Say I run a company and make a product I want juiced on Amazon with fake reviews. I pay company X a chunk of money, and they enlist people to go on Amazon, do a general search, mimic the pattern of a shopper narrowing down a product, settle on my product, and order it. The person gets the product, and a few days later, writes a positive review. Company X then reimburses them for the product plus gives them a little extra. The person gets the product for free plus a little money for their time.
I get a bump in visibility/search result placement for my product on Amazon, plus a number of good reviews. I paid company X a bunch of money, but a small portion of that money actually came back to me by way of the sales done by company X's shoppers. My bet is that my improved position on Amazon leads to more sales and I more than make up for the money I paid to X.
So one of the reasons it's hard for Amazon to deal with this type of fake review is that from their end, it so closely mimics the behavior of a legitimate customer that they can't tell the difference.
Re: (Score:2)
Not that expensive to sell 100 items, when your goal is to bulk ship some 10.000.
So compensation for 200 items, for purchasing 100 reviews isn't expensive in that context.
This is why... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It should also show the age of the account rounded to the nearest 5 years.
e.g.
< 5 Years
5+ years
10+ years
15+ years
20+ years
Re: (Score:2)
It makes me wonder how many genuinely "old" Amazon accounts have been taken over thanks to phishing and password hack dumps.
Probably enough that there is a secondary market already for "established" Amazon accounts to be bought/sold to defeat this as well.
They Could Use Meta-Data (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That was Target.com, not Amazon.com
Re: (Score:2)
It was Target, and I'm not sure that the apocryphal story itself is true, as I remember the news story about this it was expecting mothers who had yet to publicly announce their pregnancies who had brought this up.
But I think maybe there's some value in metadata analysis of reviews. My Amazon account is 20 years old, but I've only posted like 60 reviews. I'm sure there's some kind of analysis that would be useful for identifying accounts used for fake reviews based on a combination of metadata or derived
Sebastian Gorka and Pat Boone here (Score:1)
Uphill battle (Score:2)
Amazon is actually purging reviewers, even the top ranked ones.
In fact there is an entire subreddit tracking this daily: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheGr... [reddit.com] (about 6700 out of 10,000).
However for every technique they come up with, the scammers will have more new ways.
Initially it was easy. Require a valid purchase: Manufacturer distributes a 99% off coupon
Then delete reviews for coupon: Manufacturer gives a "gift" for a "unbiased" review (on another channel, or even on Amazon for an unrelated product)
Try to f
Who reads these? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I use the reviews. You have to actually read them. Some of the fake reviews are easy to spot, but that's actually kind of irrelevant because what you're looking for is the useful reviews. Even among the genuine ones, they are scarce.
You do have to know something about the products you're researching in order to spot the useful reviews, but then, you have to know something about the products to make an intelligent decision anyway. So if you're spending more than a few bucks, it behooves you to do some more i
Re: (Score:2)
I used to the whole review research thing, but found that would consume way more hours of my life than the item was worth and I could still end up with a lemon. Buying from business with good return policies helps a lot in mitigating any risk.
Consumer groups like this Choice in AU (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How one account can make so many reviews? (Score:2)
If the review can be done by anyone on any product without purchase, I think it's a pretty silly thing that invites fraud.
Positive reviews useless (Score:2)
You don't need fake reviews, because most reviewers are addled pollyannas that always give 5 stars. Only negative reviews are worth looking at, with the exception of comprehensive positive reviews. No one is writing those for a few bucks of cash.
Here's what I do (Score:1)