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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.
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.
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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?