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Amazon Going After Fake Reviews Brokered on Facebook

By Laura Tucker
Amazon Fake Reviews Featured

It’s a great status symbol for products to be listed on Amazon with four- or five-star ratings. The question is how they go about getting those ratings. Amazon is cracking down on that and is going up against Facebook and other social media companies to stop the fake reviews.

Also read: Amazon Chooses 1st Location for Drone Delivery Service

Amazon Lawsuit Against Facebook

Amazon filed a lawsuit against the admin­istrators of Facebook groups that promise money or free products in exchange for fake reviews that are published on Amazon. Mose than 10,000 administrators were named. The online retailer said in a blog post that the fake reviews are posted on Amazon store sites in the U.S, U. K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

This legal filing will help Amazon identify the fake reviews and brokers that have so far slipped through the system and “haven’t already been detected by Amazon’s advanced technology, expert investigators, and continuous monitoring.”

Amazon Fake Reviews Customer Reviews

“Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media,” said Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services, Dharmesh Mehta.

“Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”

These so-called “bad actors” arrange for many reviews for various products, including products similar to the ones Make Tech Easier reviews. When you see the reviews published here; however, you can count on them being legitimate and honest.

“Amazon Product Review” is one of the groups identified in the lawsuit. There were more than 43,000 members in this group until Amazon learned through its investigations that the administrators of the group tried to mask what it was doing “in part by obfuscating letters from problematic phrases.”

Amazon Fake Reviews Five Stars

Despite their promin­ence, fake reviews are not allowed on Amazon. The retailer has 12,000 employees who are responsible for sniffing out fraud and abuse. Along with Facebook, these fake reviews are also posted to Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Meta has already taken down more than half of the fake review groups for policy violations. The blog post claims that “expert investigators use industry-leading tools to detect and block fake reviews.” Since 2020, more than 200 million reviews that are suspected to be fake have been removed.

Yet, Fake Reviews Remain

The blog post noted that the lawsuit “is the latest step by Amazon aimed at stopping fraudsters who attempt to post fake reviews in Amazon’s stores. In the past year, legal action from Amazon has shut down multiple major review brokers.”

Amazon Fake Reviews Review This Product

Yet, as Amazon pointed out, fake reviews are an “industry-wide problem.” The online retailer understands the lawsuit will not stamp out the problem. It will take retail and other sectors working together.

The writers and editors here at Make Tech Easier are fully aware of the problem. Great effort goes into each review so that the opinions shared are 100 percent that of the reviewer and that it’s a review, not an advertisement.

Read on to learn how scammers took advantage of the Amazon Prime Video prompt.

Image source: Unsplash All screenshots by Laura Tucker.

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Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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