Amazon has filed a lawsuit against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that managed to publish fake reviews in exchange for money or free products. As the company has explained in a statement, it is about “Groups created for the purpose of recruiting people willing to post incentivized or misleading reviews on Amazon websites in United States, the , Germany, , Italy, Spain and Japan. (…) The offenders behind these groups managed false reviews of hundreds of products available on Amazon, including car stereos or camera tripods ».
Amazon will use the information collected in the course of this legal action to identify potential infringers and to remove those fake reviews that have been commissioned by them and that have not been detected by the company or by the researchers who monitor their stores.
As explained darmesh methVice President of Amazon Merchant Partner Services, “Our teams block millions of suspicious product reviews before they are seen by our customers. With this lawsuit, we are going one step further to uncover infringers operating through the . Proactive legal action against these violators is one of the many avenues we have to protect our clients and hold these violators accountable for their actions.”
Amazon and Meta, allies against fake reviews
In any case, Amazon appears to have counted on Meta’s collaboration to be able to carry out preventive actions against these types of fake review groups. Thus, the company has explained that one of the identified groups is “Amazon Product Review”which had more than 43,000 members until, at Amazon’s request, it was removed by Meta earlier this year. Investigations carried out by Amazon revealed that group administrators were attempting to camouflage their activity and circumvent Facebook’s controls by changing the characters of suspicious terms such as ““R**fund Aftr R**vew.” (term that could be translated as “R**mbolso Tr4s R**ña”).
“Amazon explicitly prohibits false reviews and has more than 12,000 employees around the world dedicated to protecting your website from fraud and abusive behavior, including posting misleading reviews. In addition, it has a dedicated team to investigate review trading groups on social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and regularly reports the activity of such groups to these companies.
Since 2020, Amazon has reported the activity of more than 10,000 groups dedicated to buying and selling fake reviews to Meta. Meta has closed more than half of them for violation of its terms and conditions of use and maintains open investigations on the rest”, explains the company. “Amazon researchers and experts use sophisticated, industry-leading tools to detect and prevent the posting of fake reviews. As a result of these actions, in 2020 alone, Amazon proactively blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews“, he clarifies.
The importance of reviews on Amazon
Amazon added product reviews to its website in 1995 so that customers could make more informed purchase decisions, and since then they have become one of the hallmarks of eCommerce. This legal action is the latest measure taken by Amazon to achieve its goal of stopping infringers who try to post false reviews on its store and comes from the royal decree approved in November 2021, which modified the General Law for the Defense of Consumers and the Unfair Competition Law.
Under this Law, companies are required to ensure that reviews of their goods and services come from people who have actually used or purchased them, as well as showing clear and detailed information about the way in which these reviews are processed. The modifications are aimed at eliminating the publication of false reviews in eCommerce, those that have been paid by sellers or companies. Likewise, the inclusion of consumer reviews and ratings without verifying that they have actually purchased the product or service is considered an unfair practice.
In any case, it is not the first time that we have talked about the controversy over false reviews in the marketplace giant. At the beginning of 2021, for example, the company began to take more severe measures on this situation, leading to the among which we can find best-selling brands in the marketplace such as Aukey, Mpow either RAV power.
Another case came to light in October 2021, in an article published by the columnist of the Wall Street Journal, Nicole Nguyen about his practices to earn reviews, as he explains in the following tweet: “(RAVpower) offered $35 gift cards in exchange for reviews on a product that Amazon itself sold directly.”
Following my fake review story, listings for Amazon-native electronics brand RAVPower are gone.
The company offered $35 gift cards for reviews on a product that was sold directly by Amazon itself. RAVPower acted as a wholesale vendor on that listing.
— nic nguyen (@nicnguyen)
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