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Scammers Are Buying Thousands Of Fake 5-Star Amazon Reviews -- on Facebook (thehustle.co)
Why are there so many five-star reviews for an iPhone charger on Amazon with a voltage irregularity that can cause permanent damage? "It's sad to imagine how many shoppers spotted this $13.99 charger pack on Amazon's first-page results and fell for the thousands of positive reviews and the algorithmically-generated endorsement from a platform that people trust more than religion," reports The Hustle.
A spot-check confirmed that "10 of the 22 first-page results on Amazon for 'iPhone charger' were products with thousands of 5-star reviews, all unverified and posted within a few days of each other," and they've now investigated "the underbelly of Amazon's fake-review economy" and "how such a product, peddled by a ragtag troupe of e-commerce scammers, managed to game one of the world's premier technology companies." The fake Amazon review economy is a thriving market, ripe with underground forums, "How To Game The Rankings!" tutorials, and websites with names like (now-defunct) "amazonverifiedreviews.com." But the favored hunting grounds for sellers on the prowl is Amazon's fellow tech behemoth, Facebook. In a recent two-week period, I identified more than 150 private Facebook groups where sellers openly exchange free products (and, in many cases, commissions) for 5-star reviews, sans disclosures. A sampling of 20 groups I analyzed collectively have more than 200,000 members. These groups seem to be in the midst of an online Gold Rush: Most are less than a year old, and in the past 30 days have attracted more than 50,000 new users... One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables...
Fake reviews have been an issue for Amazon since its inception, but the problem appears to have intensified in 2015, when Amazon.com began to court Chinese sellers. The decision has led to a flood of new products -- a 33% increase, by some accounts -- sold by hundreds of thousands of new sellers. Rooted in manufacturing hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, they use Amazon's fulfillment program, FBA, to send large shipments of electronic goods directly to Amazon warehouses in the US. This rapid influx has spawned thousands of indistinguishable goods (chargers, cables, batteries, etc.). And it has prompted sellers to game the system. "It's a lot harder to sell on Amazon than it was 2 or 3 years ago," says Fahim Naim, an ex-Amazon manager who now runs an e-commerce consulting firm. "So a lot of sellers are trying to find shortcuts." Steve Lee, a Los Angeles-based vendor, is among them: "You have to play the game to sell now," he says. "And that game is cheating and breaking the law...."
The article points out that this is illegal. "Endorsements are required to be truthful," Mary Engel, Associate Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Advertising Practices, tells the site. "If a reviewer has received something of value in exchange for their opinion, they need to clearly disclose that in the review." But instead, the review-watching site "ReviewMeta" analyzed 203 million Amazon reviews and found 11.3% (22.8 million) were untrustworthy -- while another site estimates the fake-review percentage is 30%. (Amazon's own estimate? "Less than 1%") ReviewMeta also spotted more than 2 million "unverified" reviews just in March of 2019 -- 99.6% of which were five-star. "They're almost all for these off-brand, cheap electronic products: Phone chargers, headphones, cables. Generic things that are super cheap to manufacture, have good margins, and get a ton of searches."
Though Amazon has sued over 1,000 fake-review sites to date, "Their way of handling it is reactive, not proactive," says the founder of ReviewMeta. "Amazon is a $900B company with thousands of brilliant engineers. I majored in construction management. It seems like they should be able to figure this one out."
A spot-check confirmed that "10 of the 22 first-page results on Amazon for 'iPhone charger' were products with thousands of 5-star reviews, all unverified and posted within a few days of each other," and they've now investigated "the underbelly of Amazon's fake-review economy" and "how such a product, peddled by a ragtag troupe of e-commerce scammers, managed to game one of the world's premier technology companies." The fake Amazon review economy is a thriving market, ripe with underground forums, "How To Game The Rankings!" tutorials, and websites with names like (now-defunct) "amazonverifiedreviews.com." But the favored hunting grounds for sellers on the prowl is Amazon's fellow tech behemoth, Facebook. In a recent two-week period, I identified more than 150 private Facebook groups where sellers openly exchange free products (and, in many cases, commissions) for 5-star reviews, sans disclosures. A sampling of 20 groups I analyzed collectively have more than 200,000 members. These groups seem to be in the midst of an online Gold Rush: Most are less than a year old, and in the past 30 days have attracted more than 50,000 new users... One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables...
Fake reviews have been an issue for Amazon since its inception, but the problem appears to have intensified in 2015, when Amazon.com began to court Chinese sellers. The decision has led to a flood of new products -- a 33% increase, by some accounts -- sold by hundreds of thousands of new sellers. Rooted in manufacturing hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, they use Amazon's fulfillment program, FBA, to send large shipments of electronic goods directly to Amazon warehouses in the US. This rapid influx has spawned thousands of indistinguishable goods (chargers, cables, batteries, etc.). And it has prompted sellers to game the system. "It's a lot harder to sell on Amazon than it was 2 or 3 years ago," says Fahim Naim, an ex-Amazon manager who now runs an e-commerce consulting firm. "So a lot of sellers are trying to find shortcuts." Steve Lee, a Los Angeles-based vendor, is among them: "You have to play the game to sell now," he says. "And that game is cheating and breaking the law...."
The article points out that this is illegal. "Endorsements are required to be truthful," Mary Engel, Associate Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Advertising Practices, tells the site. "If a reviewer has received something of value in exchange for their opinion, they need to clearly disclose that in the review." But instead, the review-watching site "ReviewMeta" analyzed 203 million Amazon reviews and found 11.3% (22.8 million) were untrustworthy -- while another site estimates the fake-review percentage is 30%. (Amazon's own estimate? "Less than 1%") ReviewMeta also spotted more than 2 million "unverified" reviews just in March of 2019 -- 99.6% of which were five-star. "They're almost all for these off-brand, cheap electronic products: Phone chargers, headphones, cables. Generic things that are super cheap to manufacture, have good margins, and get a ton of searches."
Though Amazon has sued over 1,000 fake-review sites to date, "Their way of handling it is reactive, not proactive," says the founder of ReviewMeta. "Amazon is a $900B company with thousands of brilliant engineers. I majored in construction management. It seems like they should be able to figure this one out."
Why is this so hard?
Books or goods, you need to actually read some reviews, ideally some good ones and some bad ones. Just looking at the rating gives you almost nothing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That's why I ignore most high reviews and carefully read bad reviews; people don't usually pay for those. If any of the bad reviews look like legitimate issues that I care about, I move on to the next choice.
I bought an item from a Chinese seller on Amazon last year. The item was defective. Amazon quickly issued a refund. Then a few days later I got a email from the seller offering me another refund. I told him I already got a refund from Amazon. Then the seller curtly told me to take down the bad review.
"Amazon is a $900B company with thousands of brilliant engineers. I majored in construction management. It seems like they should be able to figure this one out."
You know what happens when brilliant engineers get together and work hard to make something so great it's idiot-proof?
Society simply responds by building a better idiot.
The problem is never that easy when you're up against that shit all day, every day.
The whole thing of amateur reviews was falling apart from the beginning I think. Few people give a review unless they feel strongly one way or the other, and the ones who do tend to review everything as if it were a hobby. Too many also seem to think that they need to be snarky, witty, mean, or whatever. It's like they're just trying to earn points. In areas where emotions can be high, the user reviews are absolutely useless (games, movies, food). Yelp is a useless site, except that it gives map directions. Amazon reviews are nearly useless but sometimes you can find helpful instructions on fixing problems there. I see people give reviews almost immediately after getting a product, even though it's the sort of product where I want to know if it holds up for 5 to 10 years or not.
Mostly I have to cross reference from several sites, consumer reports, and ask friends and coworkers, before I know what's a good product or not and whether it's right for me.
UPS driver didn't ring bell.
When I'm looking for something, I'm generally reading the 1 and 2 star reviews. I want to know if the item will have a problem for my own use-case. A goodly number of 5-star reviews are pretty much "it's great!" which doesn't really help me determine if it's something I want to buy.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
it usually is!
a 14 USD charger from a no-name Chinese company being better than the original Apple charger?
Sounds totally plausible, sign me up!
Not.
I'm always surprised at the number of people who buy an Apple product and are then too cheap to buy the "supplies" (mainly chargers and cables and adapters).
Almost like people who buy cars with horrible MPG ratings who then turn around and complain about the thing consuming too much gas.
I have no time and no stomach to deal with a Chinese seller out of Shenzen! If I wanted to get into that business, I'd be doing it for a living already.
That's why I pay Apple and other brand-name companies large amounts of money so I have a local person to sort out warranty-claims.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
For anything past amusement? Personally, I don't pay tons of attention to reviews on amazon. I may find something on amazon that I'm interested in, but usually look elsewhere for info on it. Pretty much anything with tons of positive reviews is likely to be crap anyway, real people generally don't go out of their way to leave good reviews if there's no incentive to do so.
I am seeing a few cases where, for example there's a five-star wood burning tool but actually most of the reviews are about a spice rack from a few years ago.
Apparently if you've discontinued a quality product there's a market for the old product listing page and its associated star count. For those of us who narrow product results by star ratings it's something to beware.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I buy things in stores. I talk to the salespeople. It's much simpler that way.
I don't respond to AC's.
Very simple to work around this problem: Don't even look at items with obviously Chinese or made-up non-sensical names like QUONGWHY or FEEMII or WTFOMGBBQ. Another dead giveaway that it's a direct-from-China vendor is the laughably bad grammar on the descriptions and other writeups. Very simple. Avoid them, don't give them a red penny.
While you're at it, if you're looking for common stuff like belts or towels or wallets, you know, that kinda thing - tack "made in usa" to the end of your search string. You might be surprised. And use fucking common sense, dont' support fakebeard hipsters selling wallets for 300 bucks.
Fuck China's government and industry. Help rebuild ours.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
You read the critical reviews. You ignore the "slow shipping" ones, the "user too stupid for product" ones, and the rest you READ. Look for flaws, not dislikes. Positive reviews only matter if they explain details that aren't in the brochure.
In this specific instance, you are wrong. The fake Apple chargers in question are not made in the same factory. The internals are not even close to the same design. Only the outside plastic is the same. Hence the tendency to damage the laptop; most of the power-regulation circuitry was left out. Only way to hit the $14 price point.
And your five star Uber driver won't sexually assault you either. Full respect for people who might be "into that".
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Electronics ARE cheap. In quanity, you can build a quality phone charger for maybe $2. You can build a crappy phone charger for 75 cents. Neither costs much to manufacture, crappy ones cost half as much to make.
You can pretty easily find sites and videos where people disassemble phone chargers and also test them. There definitely IS a difference between a high quality charger and a low quality charger. Ifixit and others have disassembled Apple chargers and found they are even better than "good" chargers from other major companies, including better safety like better thermal and current overload protections.
It terms of production costs, you could buy a good charger for $5, a very good one for $10. The problem is knowing which ones are good. Apple will charge you $30 and you know it's high quality. You can spend $15 elsewhere and maybe get good quality, maybe get crap.
How I miss the good ol' days when most products were from Amazon so reviews were genuine and you could just trust them... :) (or have any relation to).
Anyway, I was a top-500 reviewer on the UK site, mainly focusing on products I know a lot about, e.g. telescopes, as reviews on technical items by people who are clueless are dangerous (the worse telescope can get a 5* review if the user manages to sort of get a glimpse of the moon with it). At some point (a couple of years ago) I noticed there were some really suspicious looking binoculars as top sellers, including multiple listings of the same tiny "30x60 night vision" binoculars that were obviously neither 30x60 nor night vision, so I took it upon myself to get and review the 3 top ones - for one of them I even signed up to a "review club" that gave them to you for free in exchange of a review. They were actually worse than I expected (e.g. one 10x50 had the body of a 50mm binocular, but just 19mm effective aperture prisms!) - you can see a blog writeup here if you are curious - so I had to leave very detailed, technical, with picture proof, but scathing reviews. Since I was a top-500 user the reviews started from the first page, but then the disappeared. I was getting mass downvoted, so I dropped in reviewer rank and the reviews themselves were not visible in the first pages. A person contacted me through my blog and send me screenshots of facebook discussions with a seller who had a big FB group with people getting stuff for reviews, who was asking for all their groupies to downvote my reviews, calling me various names. A seller (the same or not, I don't remember) also wrote me and told me I was reported to Amazon for malicious slander and they wrote comments under my reviews that I was an unscrupulous competitor, owner of "Agena Astro". That last one is sort of funny, as Agena Astro is a huge and very respected US astronomical retailer which I, sadly, do not own
Anyway, I contacted Amazon, sent them all that stuff including images of the whistleblower, they did jack. Not even restore my reviews or reviewer ranking, never mind punishing those organized sellers & reviewers. I mean Amazon has GREAT support if you are a customer in general (they have helped me even with badly behaving manufacturers - call me Samsung), but I was kind of appalled at how they did not care about this thing going on.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I recently came across a product with over 5,500 5-star reviews that were so obviously fake I could not believe Amazon didn't have algorithms to catch this sort of stuff. I let them know and all were removed. I did the same with another product - all reviews posted the same day and hour with many duplicate names. Amazon seems not to be trying very hard
The article points out that this is illegal. "Endorsements are required to be truthful,"
Oh well then problem solved, right? No one selling things would ever lie.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
After reading this article, I visited Amazon, signed in with my own account and tried to left a review for an article that I bought in a local store. SURPRISE! Amazon do not let me write a review for an article that I own and use everyday. How it's possible that thousands of people could left fake reviews without being spotted and stopped by Amazon, in the same way that they stopped me today from writing a review?
When I'm shopping and reading reviews, I throw out the 1-star and 5-star reviews, kind of like how they do the judging at the Olympics.
The reviews being bought are all 5-star (as the article claimed), and the 1-star reviews may be posted by the competition. Stick to reading the ones in the middle from verified purchasers and you'll have a better shot at finding the truth. You could still be mislead, but not as likely.
amazon has turned into ebay... with order fulfillment.
shitty and/or fake counterfeit and/or outright scammy & fraudulent products peddled everywhere on that site by shady foreign (chinese or hongkong based mainly) sellers...
so...
buy only from amazon.com.... (i.e. 'ships and sold by amazon.com') unless it's a seller you already trust from an existing relationship (you're just buying from them on azn instead).
consider only verified purchaser reviews.... even stuff sold by amazon themselves can have reviews gamed (such as by a shady manufacturer or distributor), buy only from those who buy the product. if you want to go a step further, limit them to only those displaying the author's confirmed real name.
amazon's web site itself is a relic from the fucking 90s (the backend with all the 'recommendations' and tracking and shit, that's the 'newer' tech they put the effort into). filters and sorting and searching don't work worth a shit, only making it worse to avoid all the scammy sellers (i'd rather not display any marketplace sellers, inventory, or prices.. only 'ships and sold by amazon.com'). i just avoid the site completely whenever reasonably possible (down from 50+ orders a year to 1-2 and steady at that the last several). costco, staples, target, and local retailers (well, semi-local.. everything is an hour+ each way by car) gets our business now.
Excellent product. Would buy again. Five stars.
I START by reading the 1,2,3 star reviews.
They are all doing it and it is not an invention of Amazon either. The "Big Lie" technique was probably best described so far by Goebbels, although it doubtlessly us much older. The problem with it is that it works well. For this reason, it does see a lot of use in politics and religion as well. It can even be used in reverse, see, for example, the anti-vaxxers or the flat-earthers. Their "big lie" is that the other side uses a "big lie". Of course, they never notice this little problem with their argumentation.
As a bonus, it is very easy to implement. That is probably why we are seeing it used in so many variations.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
After reading many comments in this thread, I just remember the very first time that I wrote to Amazon Customer Support. I asked them: "Why do you erased many accurate reviews about this book?" Their answer was: "The book author removed all unfair and biased comment about his book". I have almost forgotten about this, but now I remember.
On Amazon, it is useful to give real name as it helps in delivery and warranty / RMA. Amazon does not make it easy to give another name to publish your reviews under. There is not much reason for Amazon to make it easy, either. For not publicizing to the world what you bought, reviews need to come as AC on Amazon, or using another Amazon account.
There is a fundamental disconnect between one purchase one review, and privacy. Amazon might see it as increasing the number of reviews by even allowing privacy minded buyers to review in another name.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
competitors have been caught buying bad reviews for each other.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I am a top-500 reviewer on Amazon and top-100 on Walmart.com. I've written thousands of reviews over the years. The article seems dated and the comments above seem mostly comprised of uninformed guesses of motivation and operations of Amazon. They couldn't be more mistaken. Products with fake reviews are removed and the seller's account -- and reviewers' comments and accounts -- are deleted. The vast majority of these scammy sellers are Chinese college students, urged by their country to sell light-weight (low shipping costs) products on Amazon. If you want to find a reputable seller, look for someone who has been selling for some time, is not from China, and offers a variety of products (including heavier goods). That said, Amazon has set up many other barriers to reviews, none of which work because the average Chinese college student views this as a short-term project. How to solve the problem? Easy: Ditch the stars. Or, flag the country of the seller. Or, offer time-on-Amazon and products-sold as reputation rankings on sellers. Or, do the same for reviewers, more clearly. Or, more clearly indicate whether the review is from a purchaser or not. Or, offer a checkbox so reviewers could indicate any number of factors that would indicate the review is legitimate. Or, split off Chinese sellers entirely in a sub-category. Or, require more words per review -- legitimate or not, "Works good, arrived on time" is not a helpful review. But they don't/won't do any of that, because Amazon's actual motivation is to prop up Amazon's Vine Voice program which charges $1,000 per review run, and which most sellers apparently cannot afford, and was a non-starter to begin with, and has only gotten (much) worse since -- untenable for most seasoned reviewers, IMO. For conspiracy theorists, Vine Voice will not accept reviewers who give out 5-stars, as far as I can tell, almost ever. Further, Amazon has become openly hostile toward all reviewers, including those who care (unlike your average fake reviewer) and offer legitimate reviews, which has eliminated almost all actual reviews. Legitimate reviews on Amazon.com have plummeted, so their "solutions" have exacerbated the problem because fake reviewers are willing to sign up for hundreds of fake review accounts and offer thousands of fake reviews -- all of which will be deleted in a month or two. Some may remain online because the humans managing the program seem put-upon and their output quality appears to have fallen, though I can't say I blame them. Yet, despite hundreds of years of book reviews without bias ever being alleged because the book was sent to the reviewer at no direct cost, Amazon flatly rejects reviews where the publisher sends the book for free. Reviews are work. So the cost is implicit. Nothing is ever "free" when it comes to reviewing products. Or are we to assume that every movie and book review in history is illegitimate since it was "free?" Articles like this only make the problem worse because Amazon simply pretends they are the victims -- "we're under assault!" -- to render their fee-based Vine Voice program as the only channel to actual reviews. See, Amazon doesn't care if sellers pay for reviews, as long as they are the ones who keep the payment! Imagine how hypocritical that looks to the Chinese college student sellers... All the more reason to treat them dishonestly in return (apparently). So, believe whatever you want, but that's the view from the inside.
I don't understand why people bother answering the questions a lot of times. When you have bought something from Amazon and somebody asks a question then Amazon sometimes emails you it to you and asks if you can answer it. Some people must feel compelled to answer because many times you see "I don't know" or "I bought it as a gift."
Of course sometimes the questions are just as bad because the are asking for information that's posted about the item.