Amazon and the Better Business Bureau have teamed up to file lawsuits against alleged fake review brokers in an effort to put a stop to the practice and ensure shoppers have a trustworthy experience.
To illustrate the problem, Troubleshooters once set up their own online businesses to see if they could buy and post fake reviews, which was surprisingly easy to do.
Troubleshooters warned in 2018 that fake reviews had become a big problem.
“I just submitted a file of 26,000 fake reviews two weeks ago,” said Jason Brown of ReviewFraud.org.
Amazon announced that it had actively blocked more than 250 million suspected fake reviews by 2023.
“Our machine learning examines thousands of data points, continually looking for indicators of risk that we can only see internally,” said Rebecca Mind, Amazon's head of customer trust and fraud prevention.
Amazon said that thanks to its efforts, only 1% of products have fake reviews, but acknowledged that it can be hard for consumers to spot them on their own.
“Maybe you're seeing too many exclamation points or bad grammar, but these aren't good indicators of whether a review is real or fake,” Mind said.
So Amazon teamed up with the Better Business Bureau to file a lawsuit against ReviewServiceUSA.com.
The lawsuit alleges that the website sold fake reviews to unscrupulous individuals who then posted them on Amazon product listing pages and BBB business profile pages. It alleges that ReviewServiceUSA used fake customer accounts to post false positive reviews in an attempt to inflate ratings and rankings.
“By working together, we can really send a message to fake review brokers that we're going to root out fake reviews,” Mind said.
The action may already have been successful, as ReviewServiceUSA.com is no longer active.
Additionally, Namecheap, Inc., listed as the contact for the registration URL, told the troubleshooter, “We are pleased to inform you that the fraudulent service has been stopped.”
Amazon won its first judgment against a fake review broker in March, and several other cases are currently pending.
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