Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach
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These are then immediately followed by a 1 star review along the lines of "This is the biggest piece of junk I've ever bought online. Will be returning to Amazon. DO NOT BUY!"
These aren't to be confused with the indiscriminate idiots who can't be bothered to use their brains, who leave mindless reviews such as "This is junk but it was cheap and kinda works... 5 stars!" Right.
Most times this trend of 5's followed by 1's is seen even in the first page of reviews. It's a serious problem with the platform. I usually search for reviews written by people who have had the product for a week or two and give the pros/cons along with a less than 5 star rating. That helps me avoid the fakes and the idiots.
This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious.
Amazon doesn't do either - sellers are allowed to put up basically everything that's legal to sell somewhere on the world (including propaganda materials for all kinds of questionable groups including right-wing terrorism), and they don't care at all about complaints from customers about fake products or shoddy quality.
They only seem to care when big media representatives short-circuit the system and raise a stink at the PR team.
I wouldn't say that they were indiscriminate nor not bothered to use their brains. One of the all too often seen things is a card for "leave a 5 star review and get a $10 amazon gift card" in the package.
Yes, its part of an effort to get 5 star reviews since the sorting of the product on amazon is more important than the text in the reviews below the fold. Yes, that's unscrupulous on both the buyer's and the seller's part.
But it is not indiscriminate or brainless on the part of the reviewer. It's selfish.
Man, I remember when you could trust reviews, search for an item, filter anything below 4 stars and get a decent, reliable list of products to choose from. You felt like you had some of the best damn kitchen knives your budget could afford.
Cynically, turn a blind-eye to misdemeanours of third-party sellers so long as there is data to be mined. Gradually replicate best-selling merchandise through your own-brand labels and then slowly dispose of the third-party sellers whilst retaining evidence of how they were systematically breaching the program terms in order to mitigate any chance of a class-action law suit.
For various things (certain electronics/peripherals, certain tools) I deliberately avoid Amazon because I want something I can trust and don't have energy to decide which of the fifteen similar-looking things on Amazon is well-made and which is a fake or just crap.
That Vietnamese company with the 3x capacity:price ratio is probably selling junk. There are just so many more junk sellers (at least by name—maybe a handful operating all those names). So it boils down to taking a gamble when the odds are against you, getting lucky, and building a relationship or going to a retailer you trust already.
I've had great luck in these situations buying from a small company that filtered out which cheap brands were good products. However I already have some other reason to trust those small companies.
You also can tell low quality products for the poor English/Grammar and knockoff similar brand names.
Amazons search really sucks quiet often a long tail search term will return product that in no way matches searcher intent.
> Companies are amoral
This is presented as a truism, but it is not true. Companies can be as moral as they wish to be. One of the reasons we have found ourselves auctioning off the arms and legs of American industry to China is this race-to-the-bottom mentality of "it's just business" that prioritizes short term profit over the long term viability of a company. Yet those companies have lobbyists, marketers, and advertisers, which they use to fight expensive battles in the marketplace and regulatory forum. Some companies even have the benefit of being under the same ownership umbrella as a venerated newspaper or popular cable news network.
Morality doesn't dissipate into thin air just because a few people throw their lot in together and try to make money. Apart from having financial incentives to do no harm to their customers or areas of service, companies have the capacity to make decisions based on reasoning about what is right and what is wrong. There is no fiduciary duty to do harm for the sake of profit.
Might only help somewhat with the fake reviews. From the "Avoiding Detection" section:
"Fraudulent businesses give reviewers specific criteria to follow to avoid detection on Amazon. These criteria are designed to present the reviews as legitimate. In this ElasticSearch server, vendors asked reviewers to wait a few days before publishing a review. They also request substantial reviews that are longer than just a few words, and may even outline certain details that should be included in the review."
Exclamation points are the giveaway in most fake reviews.
The same goes for Glassdoor. The more exclamation points in a 5-star review of a company, the more likely it was written by an HR person or the CEO.
If you ask me, the new Verified Purchase shill reviews since the rules changes are worse for shoppers than the shill reviews with disclaimers (which were always easy to spot and ignore).
It's a good example of "be careful what you wish for".
Because there are absolutely no consequences, and general boosterism increases sales. If you go to site X and there are a mix of good and bad reviews for a product, but then go to Amazon and see all good reviews a similar product, you buy at Amazon. Especially if you have Prime, which you might just have because you like a tv show.
If a systematic fraud is exposed, accounts are banned, Amazon press-releases a "crackdown", new accounts are quietly created by new business entities owned by the same people, process continues. What's the cost?
I remember even walking into a brick and mortar store, confused because I had no way to judge, for example, one rice cooker against another.
As the reliability of Amazon's reviews has waned, so has my loyalty.
If I'm just rolling the dice now, I might as well roll the dice on eBay or aliexpress.....
If my trust in long term reviews erode, I'm inclined to buy less.
Word of mount is a powerful tool that amazon has harnessed with reviews, and has seemingly replaced the need to see a product in person before a purchase.
However, for some categories, such as batteries or electronics, even after examining all the negative reviews and rates, I've found it impossible to get non-counterfeit products. I'm happy to go to a regional specialist in such items or even to a big-box store just to get greater confidence in a genuine item.
(&yes, don't even think about getting 18650s on Amazon. I saw someone selling boxes with a Tesla logo & brand - obvious BS. I reported it and at least did see them disappear in a week, but another popped up.)
Amazon will eventually drop you as a customer if you make it a regular thing to file returns.
There’s weird psychological aspects with this. People want to buy 5 star product.
I don’t know how well this translates to best buy, since they probably don’t have the same really large purchases skewing the average up, but I’m positive returns are a net positive for them using similar metrics.
I paid for college working at a big box store 20 hours a week in the 90s, about 50% of commissions were trolling the return line and selling to those folks.
For Amazon, I don’t think it’s that way… you mail them a return and they don’t cross-sell, many times they scrap and sell by the pound.
Which's primary benefit seems to be for White goods, but how often do you buy a new fridge/oven/etc?
I find amazon reviews are still fine. Read the worst reviews read 3* reviews to find all the worst things. Use 5* reviews to get an idea.
I'm also the kind of person that goes straight to the 2-3 star reviews. I want to know the issues and determine if it's just sour grapes (damaged on delivery) or something I should be concerned about. When I was browsing step up converters, I found some amazing reviews at the 2* levels... like engineers that picked the product apart and determined they were wired wrong and might be a fire hazard. Sadly these types of reviews get buried and often ignored by the worthless deluge of 5* reviews.
The second one gets caught for fake reviews, just put the name through another random generator and back up.
Trust is eroding, but every time we try and use an Amazon competitor we come crawling back. When do viable alternatives emerge?
Out of curiosity, why do you come back to Amazon? Is it the delivery speed, price, or something else?
Or that Amazon can't move beyond their startup mentality of growth uber alles. Perhaps the best move at this point is not to continue their existing approach, and redefine their storefront to something other than a nicer Aliexpress.
I’m not sure how Amazon operates in the US, but in Northern Europe it’s main target very clearly isn’t the informed customer, but the people who’s next step is going on one or the Chinese sites like wish. Maybe having a lot of fake reviews is simply better than having few reviews for their target audience? Hell, half the stuff on Amazon.de is resales of things that are clearly imported from China, so maybe Amazon’s role is simply to broker these wares in a manner that’s not as prone to getting the buyer scammed? Or maybe shit reviews is just better for sales than no reviews?
Sometimes I wonder about even these ones though - they could have been written by those with a competing product being sold on Amazon.
That doesn’t sound necessarily fake, that just sounds like humans being humans. You see this in many reviews on other sites, as well.
Not saying they’re not fake, but my understanding was that the fake reviews usually go through a little more effort than that.
I usually don't buy random junk off of amazon all the time like some do so when I make a purchase, I already know exactly what I want and it's something totally necessary.
What's wrong with that? If you buy a pair of headphones for 2$, you simply can not expect good sound. But if it works well enough to hear what you need to hear, this sounds pretty fair.
If the 1 stars has a bump vs the rest, you better know it's got a ton of fake reviews.
Legit products have a relatively smooth curve "long tailing" into 1 star.
Soon though, the scam reviewers will start smoothing the curve out and then I don't know what to do anymore.
I saw an amazon review of someone complaining that a drill bit they bought got bent drilling through a brick. The picture they provided showed quite clearly that they had severely damaged and bent a brad-point drill bit (which is meant to be used for wood). The bending can also be explained by the fact that these drill bits are usually nowhere near as hard or brittle, presumably because if you ever try to use a drill bit intended for drilling through metal to drill wood you will quickly find how easy it is to snap it when it's in a thick bit of wood, and people don't usually drill deep holes in metal without a drill press to keep the drill going straight.
Oh, and the worst part of the amazon experience has to be the number of "Answers" to "Questions" where the answer is just: "Sorry, I don't know the answer."
“Update: support contacted me…”
They just straight up PayPal you money to change your negative review. Trick is once they pay change your review back and say they paid you but Amazon will likely remove the review at that point.
One way to fix is to only allow verified purchases.
Amazon also needs to remove the ability for sellers to request reviews be removed.
Amazon also needs to be less strict on negative reviews. Right now it doesn’t seem there’s any moderation on five star but if you put 1 star they really don’t approve them much. Most of mine have been declined.
They need to stop sellers from taking over older product pages or switching what product a page is sold on. There’s this common scam where they will sell a legit gizmo and get high reviews them swap it for the junk scam item. No idea why they let this happen as it seems so obvious but who knows.
Also need to really ramp up moderation of third party sellers. Start being picky about what they allow to be sold. Anything sold in the sad card category needs to be manually verified.
and then deep dive into conjecture, and your feelings.
I used to work at Amazon, and can say that this came up on internal mailing lists all. the. time. It really bothers people, particularly engineers who see that it is eroding customers' trust in Amazon. It's really bad, and people know it. There were significant teams trying to work on it when I left.
I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection. It's very adversarial, and Amazon has the tough position of _also_ not wanting to discourage legitimate reviews and sellers. And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well.
So: I think they're trying, but it's a bona fide hard problem.
For me, a good start would be:
- Only allow people to rate things that they bought with their own money, as evidenced by a credit card or bank account linked with their name on it.
- Only allow people to rate things after they have purchased multiple products, or after you've spent above a certain threshold (e.g. $100).
AFAICT, those are not currently requirements on Amazon and would go a long way (in my layman's imagination) towards fixing the problem.
Your first suggestion doesn't address paid reviews. Usually the scheme is "buy it, and we will reimburse you with a little extra on top after you leave a review."
Your second suggestion would probably bias towards fake reviewers. It's pretty rare for someone to get paid just for one review.
One of the hard things to realize is that paid reviews are written by real people. Most of them probably know they are doing something shady, but not all - some think this is a legitimate marketing interaction. Many of them also leave real reviews for stuff - including negative reviews. It's generally not actually bots writing reviews.
If Amazon also required actual purchase of that item, now there's the extra cost of actually buying that item. Even more so when you're talking about things that are expensive. This would drastically lower the amount of spam that could be generated unless the company wants to throw some huge money at it.
Returned items would still potentially be an issue, but I'm guessing Amazon already has things in place to kick off users that return too many items.
Amazon has the brain power and resources to mitigate this problem...
Amazon probably doesn’t consider this much of a priority to deal with as it doesn’t hurt them just their customers.
Item 2) Professional reviewers have purchased multiple products above certain threshold.
Easier way to stop this is to prevent reviews from people who used a coupon to buy something and the price is above some threshold (i.e. seller doesn't knock to $5 between 10PM and midnight for their reviewers to buy it).
If I can think of this solution - why can't Amazon? Simple answer is they know of this behavior and encourage it.
I have shifted my purchasing behavior to buy from Walmart, Target, Ebay when at all possible. I know Walmart isn't exactly an angel - but I'd rather have 2 devils in the marketplace than 1. I even try to buy books from Barnes And Noble...but unfortunately the fulfillment time + price is hard to beat w/ Amazon. I rarely have books above the B&N threshold for free shipping.
I reported it fi eBay as method of payment looked dodgy as well.
Was instructed that everything was fine and to ship it. I didn’t.
Now a week later I got another email say that it might be a scam. So they canceled it.
- they killed their subscription service (last year?) - laundry detergent may or may not be taped (they at least bag it), leading to spillage - they use the same flimsy tape for all of their packages - they stopped using any sort of package space filler (I really liked when they were using long sheets of paper - makes me less worried about plastic waste, and we could give them to our son so he could color on them) - you need to use their app for curbside pickup (Home Depot does this right with the ability to do it with or without their app) - inconsistent availability of items for shipping
It's easy to meet their free shipping limit, and it's nice to have the option to pickup from a local location, but unlike some retailers, I feel Target would rather you either shop in their physical stores, or go somewhere else.
Unfortunately, I still put up with Amazon for probably 40% of my purchases. It's fast and generally cheap. (Even though even Amazon Prime has gotten ridiculous)
Honestly it's really hard to believe you. That may have been what you were told but there's hundreds of well documented cases of sellers manipulating reviews where Amazon does not penalize the seller.
The logical explanation is Amazon has decided not to punish sellers who manipulate reviews if Amazon thinks it's a net gain for Amazon.
Yeah, I get it. For what it's worth - I didn't just get told they care, I saw some of the systems that were built to work on detection.
Amazon is not a very short-term oriented company. They're usually pretty good at caring about long-term dominance to get dollars in ten years rather than pennies today. It's clear as day to anyone that fake reviews are hurting their image to customers, eroding trust. That's leading people to buy stuff elsewhere.
At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term health of the retail business.
It's hard for me to explain the cases where people find obvious fraud and the seller doesn't get penalized. These would get flagged internally in mailing lists too, and most of the time it was a process error somewhere - a ticket that got dropped when shuffled between the zillion different departments; Amazon's internal bureaucracy is truly insane and huge. I think it's usually incompetence rather than devious cleverness, honestly.
There are probably some other cases that are more complicated (sellers reopening new accounts, and then doing social engineering on unwitting poorly-paid support people to regain listings). I think those are kind of rare.
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Anyway, all this to say: I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful. But... they're really not. It's a huge, slow, bureaucratic, sludgy company. They have some money (okay, a lot of money) and technical talent but it isn't super clear how you'd apply those to this problem. It's hard.
This has nothing to do with thinking Amazon is all-powerful, and everything to do with thinking they don't care because it makes them money. Amazon's revenue is clearly skyrocketing and they make a ton of money because of the marketplace. It seems obvious to me they made the decision to put revenue/profits over long-term customer support.
You believe that Amazon wants to solve the problem. I believe Amazon doesn't want to solve the problem, because they make more money not solving it now. And talking about the long-term vision of a company whose founding CEO just stepped down is pretty meaningless.
I'll be more blunt. Amazon saying they care about fake reviews is like Facebook saying they care about privacy. They make money by lying about it, not fixing it. Facebook clearly hasn't suffered the long term damage of years of horrible PR using their stock price as a metric (you know, the only metric that really matters), and Amazon likely won't either (in fact they've had just as much bad PR and look at them now).
I am glad you seem to enjoy working at Amazon, or at least have a respect for the culture. I've never been there so I can't comment on it, but I've heard lots of horrible things about the culture there. And lately the complaints have been shifting towards Amazon thinking more and more about short-term profits instead of the big picture.
All I can say is not everybody agrees with you.
FWIW, single data point, YMMV, etc., but where I work (under AWS) I have never seen behavior that is exploitive of the customer like you're talking about to be encouraged or allowed.
Yes, AWS may be different from how things are done in retail, and we're huge so I'm sure it does happen here and there -- but from my admittedly limited vantage point, Bezos' heavy emphases on long-term thinking and earning the customer's trust have taken deep root everywhere I've been able to see.
Doesn't mean peeps always get it right, some choices are difficult, compromises have to be made, there are outliers, etc., but still, it's there. I've just never seen cheap thinking around customers, so to speak, and I really like that aspect of working where I do.
If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.
And I'm saying I think this is already happening, and the most talented senior employees are already starting to leave. This is going to take years, maybe decades to unravel. But I've already shifted away from buying things on Amazon because the experience has become significantly worse for me and I'm better off buying elsewhere.
You're welcome to disagree, but I think Amazon is no longer about value creation but value extraction. And quite frankly it doesn't matter if you feel differently as an employee, because that's how I feel as a customer.
You believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because they are greedy and evil and are happy to have it. I believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because it's beyond their capabilities, and that nobody knows how to ensure trustworthy information on the internet.
But we arrive at the same spot: I don't really buy from Amazon anymore either for anything where the quality matters, because I can't trust anything on there. I use Chewy for pet stuff, Newegg or Monoprice for electronic stuff, Lee Valley for gardening stuff - etc.
In a way, I'm more pessimistic than you: I think good intentions wouldn't even help.
Bull shit.
There will be Amazon rockets and maybe one day a Mars landing but stopping mass fraud is too big a problem?
This isn't hard. Seriously, you have lost all goodwill from me - anyone that isn't a fucking idiot could immediately solve this problem. But Amazon doesn't want to lose money, is what you really mean.
Fuck Amazon and fuck you. I have more respect for Facebook at this point.
Reasons:
- Receiving broken, clearly used/returned, or counterfeit items.
- Product reviews obviously gamed and useless.
- Sticking their nose into political issues. Just run your services please and don't try to tell me what to read or think.
A lot of people love Amazon now but this kind of shit screws customers and that’s unacceptable.
Sure you get short term results because colleagues are competing against one another to not get into the PIP meat grinder, but inevitably it leads to burnout and people leaving.
Not to mention Amazon’s reputation in tech is pretty low b/c everyone knows about this management by PIP culture
Would that go away once the shitty reviews go away? I'm not convinced it would. The economic impact would be on shitty sellers as they would lose revenue, but I suspect a lot of that revenue would just go to good products.
That is basically the same thing as all powerful in this context. It is the same pattern of sinisterization in the whole "Big Tech Bad" propaganda push.
This is a long winded way of saying "Yeah it sucks, but we're not losing as much money as we are making because of this, so we're not as invested in fixing this problem."
I'm not doubting whether they want it fixed. I'm doubting the priority they put on it.
If fake reviews simply penalize the seller, you've opened up an attack channel where anyone can submit fake reviews and eliminate competitors from the marketplace. It's complicated.
The problem was created by amazon and can be fixed by Amazon.
Close the backdoor entrance for chinese sellers, and problem solved.
Amazon made it easy for random chinese companies to onboard as amazon sellers because it lowered every single barrier from an import/ banking/permit perspective
Amazon can close that door anytime it wants.
Let's say the seller is selling widgets. They get their phantom accounts to buy the widgets and thus run up the lifetime spend counter. Then they give the "purchased" widgets to themselves and just keep on selling them.
All they have to pay per iteration is the overhead (Amazon's take), assuming they'll manage to clear their stock later.
E.g. say a widget costs $110, of which Amazon's take is $10. The seller uses their fake account to buy 10 widgets at a total cost of $1100. The seller both receive the widgets (shipped to the fake account's address) and the $1000 from the "sale". The total cost is thus $100 for making the fake account look like it has spent $1000.
Amazon business model was being a parasite, benefiting from the system of high quality products and trust built into the system. Without having to pay distributors, buyers, and store rents. And lest we forget sales tax.
But that old system is now dead and gone. So there are no trustworthy good faith reviewers.
Random internet individuals: "But they could just..."
Like so many things/problems - they all seem easy/obvious until you actually TRY TO DO IT, at which point you realize why all of the other very smart people haven't solved it yet.
I put it in the same bucket as fake accounts on Twitter. My guess is that Twitter can correlate many accounts that do nothing but troll and shill for particular factions, and probably has a registry of these accounts, but they also lose MAUs when they nuke accounts. They have an incentive to wait until user growth comes in stronger than expected before they ban lots of active users.
For me personally, the biggest weakness of Amazon is commingling of inventory. I never buy things like lubricants and bearings from Amazon, even if the seller is an authorized distributor, because there's no guarantee I will avoid knockoffs from a different seller. I'd rather buy from Walmart or pay more for a specialty retailer to ship me the product, because Amazon inventory is often mixed with cheap knockoff garbage.
This actually raises a core part of the problem: why does Amazon need literally dozens of sellers for every piece of junk on the site? For any sort of commodity on the site, there can be thousands of results. All the same. All within a few percent of the same price. All completely indistinguishable through any mechanism in the search facility. There have been so many times that I've been looking for something with a specific feature, and it's just page after page after page of stuff I don't want, that I finally give up and just buy the crap they're shoving at me. That brutally-carnal competition for every nickel and dime is a big part of the motivation to flood the platform with fake reviews.
What made Amazon great at the start was the fact that they DID NOT carry every conceivable item under the sun, from every single person who wants to spin up a mercantile account and give it a whirl. I've gone back to buying most things from brick-and-mortar stores because THEY are still doing the curation. They're not going to carry 17,000 different USB cables, and the ones they do are going to be high-enough quality that they don't have a high rate of return. I wish Amazon all the worst. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: No one shops at Amazon any more; it's too crowded.
When I buy stuff on Amazon, it's not because I want Amazon to recommend their pick. I want to compare alternatives and make my own choice. That's getting harder and harder, because there's a gazillion identical results with spammy, polluted product names, sold by a bajillion different-yet-indistinguishable sellers. And each one of those results has a nice, fancy-looking template, but when you start reading, it's full of spelling and grammar errors.
It's as frustrating as trying to have a "conversation" with a chat bot.
What's the solution? Beats me. A naive part of my brain is suggesting some kind of vetting process for sellers, or maybe a trust rating, but I'm sure there are tons of horrible problems with those ideas.
Let's not forget that it is Amazon that is providing this huge monetary incentive.
As a customer, I really wouldn't care if Amazon dropped all 3rd party sellers. Most users won't. Amazon, of course, will.
I recently bought a dog collar on Amazon. A week or so later, I got a large envelope in the mail, with "Amazon Early Reviewer Program, 2646 Rainer Ave S St 1020, Seattle, WA 98144" as the return address.
Inside was a piece of paper with a code to "activate my $20 gift card" by leaving a 5-star review of the dog collar, photographing the review, and emailing it to a very non-Amazon email. It also instructed me that "for security reasons", I should not include or attach this letter to my review, nor leave a negative review without emailing them first. All this still purports to be from Amazon proper with the Amazon logo on the paper as well.
This is clearly a scam from the seller to buy 5-star reviews, and their product has plenty of what look to be paid reviews to me as a result. I tried very hard to find any place to report this scheme, which goes past review buying to include impersonating Amazon itself, and mail fraud. I emailed several Amazon contacts, used contact forms on their site, and contact forms I could find on the seller side as well. I attached photos of the letter.
The only response I got was a form letter telling me that if I saw a fake review, I should click the report button under that review.
This is just one example. Almost every product I've bought in the past year that came from an individual seller included some kind of bribe for 5-star reviews, from gift cards to whole "free products every month" programs.
I reported this to Microsoft as it was an outlook.com source address. Microsoft did nothing. My junk mail folder was starting to fill.
After about two months of this i got passive aggressive and set up a script to email them a 20 meg gif with “fuck you” tiled on it hourly to their mailbox. After about a day they got the point and I stopped receiving emails.
I think amazon have stopped sellers getting hold of buyers emails directly now though.
I agree. I don't get why there hasn't been more progress on this. The ratings are almost meaningless now on almost the majority of products on Amazon.
Amazon themselves seem to be directly making the problem worse with "early access reviews" or whatever they're called.
You can roll this out with two 5-star rating systems and replace the old one once the new one has enough ratings.
Uhm, how about not commingling inventory and not letting people swap out entire products underneath the same ratings/reviews?
I really wish Amazon expose return rate for each product. That would be better indication of customer satisfaction.
Also I wish there was not such a stigma against returning products. That would be a good way to drive bad players out of business. A few times when I returned something I apologized too much but store employees said that I am doing them a favor by returning it because this is how they determine what to stop selling in their store and prevent shier people from buying junk products.
I don't see why sellers should be worse off then buyers on Amazon, seeing as they're both customers.
Another option might be no returns at all. This way buyers will need to do their due diligence before buying and less likely to impulse purchase crap. Probably better for the society as a whole. Also things will be cheaper as retailers will not need to account for any returns.
For that matter, buying USB charging hubs is a nightmare. The reviews are identical on every single one: there’s always at least one who overloaded theirs and complained that their house burnt down.
For the next two months someone from the seller company constantly sent me emails offering a $30 gift card to me to change the rating to a 5 star. So those “it’s trash...5 star” are probably people being paid to change their initial review.
I’ve thought about taking their money but added in a statement in the review that the 5 star was a paid request from the seller, just to screw their practice a bit. But stopped fearing that Amazon might ban my account.
It's probably one of those situations where it's obvious, but not provably so.
It's like when you pass a huge pile of random bike parts in a pile next to a homeless encampment: it's 100% a bike chop shop, duh, anyone can see that...but you can't prove that it's a chop shop just based off of what you saw, so police can't take action without substantial further investigation.
It's easy enough for us as to consumers to spot fake reviews, but can you prove that they're fake just because they're repetitive or awkwardly written or whatnot?
Just like sarcasm is really hard to detect in an online forum, even with human intelligence, and having some conversational context, I think determining reviewers true intent is really really hard.
And Amazon appears unmotivated to do anything about it. As a personal example, I had purchased a mouth guard that had over six thousand 5-star reviews. It was listed as high quality, FDA approved, etc. When I received it, it was a piece of plastic junk with inkjet quality instructions in English and Chinese. Along with it came a note promising a $10 Amazon gift card if I left a 5 star review and emailed them proof of it.
I took a photo of the note and forwarded it to Amazon expecting some action - instead I received a canned response about "we take these issues seriously". A year later, that seller is still there with dozens of products, all with thousands of 5-star reviews.
Too many fake products that look like they’re the real things, and if they’re fake who knows where they come from or what they’re made of.
Reviews with pictures seem better, or like reddit reviews if it's a brand name.
Part of the issue we all keep buying this junk and reporting it to Amazon instead of the police, ftc and other enforcement bodies
I figure, if anything, my reports might influence investigations or prosecutions later down the line, along with evidence and reports gathered by others. I don't really expect anyone to reach out to me unless they want my testimony, and at that point, I'm sure there are better people they could drag into hearings or court.
1. Find some cheap-ass white-label product and order a crap-ton of it.
2. List on amazon for a nice markup
3. Bribe idiots to leave 5 star reviews.
It's just not worth it anymore to buy something on Amazon only to receive a counterfeit and then have to order the same thing directly from the manufacturer anyway; something something poor man pays twice
Maybe this is a good investment opportunity? I'm joking, but they did offer me almost twice the price of the product itself, which is interesting.
Something also curious is that the seller initially sent emails starting with with "Hi, [my sister's name]". Her name was not associated with my amazon account at all, and definitely not the name shown on the amazon review. I wonder where they are retrieving the names from for this.
I've stopped writing reviews on Amazon. Apparently you can't talk trash about a product you were unhappy with....
Now I get messages asking me to please fix the review because they will get in trouble for refunding me and not getting a 5 star review, and they thought we had a deal. Sort of coercive, urgent language.
So creepy and obnoxious.
The hardest part for a lot of smaller sellers is that with enough negative reviews you can have your account locked or even cancelled and there is nothing (not much) you can do about it, just like dealing with a Google or Facebook lockout. There is no recourse for most people.
Anecdote: just before the pandemic me and my SO searched for a Sushi place one day. Found one on Google, 4.7 star average on 500ish reviews. Should be good, right?
Nope. It was literally the worst restaurant experience of my life. Nobody was inside. Weird location. The menu screamed "run by cheap assholes trying to scam you". It's always a huge red flag when well over 100 menu items exist and all are from different Asian cuisines (BUT authentic Chinese restaurants will still be amazing despite 700+ items).
Hungry, we still sat down and ate and dear god was it bad. I will spare you details. Some weird Indian dude pretended to service us, food was worse than gas station sushi.
So what happened? We made the mistake to just look at the summed score and not the reviews. It were obvious paid Indian reviews and bots. So obvious that I was angry at myself for the stupidity not to check more closely and angry at Google to allow such bullshit on their platform.
He doubles down on making sure you understand that Indian = dishonest by mentioning fake reviews, that were surely created by Indians. Maybe they were, but that is not materially important to the situation. Fake reviews can just as easily be created by Americans, or Japanese, or literally anyone on Earth.
I understand that people like you tire of hearing your thoughts and ideas challenged. It's part of the reason the world is becoming more polarized. People would rather stick their fingers in their ears and say everything is okay, rather than face the problems that exist in society. I hope you remove the fingers some day.
If he was directly insinuating that Indians are bad then I'd agree with you. Being Indian is simply a supplementary detail to the story. It didn't have to be Indian, didn't have to be a sushi restaurant, didn't have to be Google for reviews. Does mentioning a sushi restaurant make it insinuating that sushi restaurant = bad and thus not okay. What details are okay and what are not. If it's just the race then what makes his race in a totally different category to all other descriptors used in the description. Please be specific
My guess would be part of his negative experience was on him being a negative person.
Maybe you should stop accusing random people on the Internet of pretty grave character issues when all that is stated are factual circumstances which I won't apologize for. I can also just randomly assume that you are some white knight seeking validation by defending ephemeral descriptions of people you have never met.
It just happened to be Indians in this case and idk under which rock you live, but shitty restaurants trying to ride the hype wave of certain cuisines isn't a new thing. Getting served sushi by an Indian by itself doesn't mean shit but in combination with all other factors it matters.
How many times have you been served by an Indian in a sushi restaurant?
Combine that with a lot of machine learning and you could probably get a very accurate way to judge which products will delight which customers.
I wonder - could a third party do this? Amazon reviews could all be scraped...
I still get a few emails every week, even though it's been years since I reviewed anything and I'm now reviewer #1,263,485.
Edited to add: I think it takes into account how many people vote your reviews as helpful. I got a lot of helpful votes because I received books weeks or months before they were released (I had a book review blog) and would post reviews on the release date so they would be one of the first reviews up.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AENQAO4BXMO7...
So to the fakery professionals, it’s an industry leaderboard.
To you and me, who have need to spot fake reviews, it’s a singularly valuable sample of what to be on guard against. So thanks, Amazon, for clueing us in to just how rotten your system really is!
It removes reviews from most products, and shows you what it thinks the most trustworthy, and least trust worthy reviews are.
It's pretty inexcusable that Amazon hasn't implemented a similar approach. They certainly have enough resources.
I guess maybe I'm lucky in that I've never considered a product with blatantly fake reviews, however I also recognize that in order to compete even legitimate companies need to "play the game".
"Caveat emptor" was a saying long before the internet, after all. No matter where you buy, you're taking a bit of a risk and should try to manage it however you can. I still use ReviewMeta, and often follow where it leads if there's a distinction, but I also think we have a lot of work to do applying what we already know about gaming-resistant filtering in domains like this.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R17NDQEUZQESUX/re...
I wonder if there are any middle man review services out there that can offer product reviews to online stores, along with proper moderation.
If I see a product on Walmart.com I want to buy, but there are no reviews, I'll usually search for it on Amazon just to see reviews. But once I'm on Amazon, they usually have the better price and free 2-day shipping with Prime.
I'm 50/50 on affiliate links, but tend to trust them more if it links directly to the manufacturer's webstore.
You know these are scams because SSD chips with a high enough density to get 2TB in a keychain form factor are going to be cost thousands. When they're advertising $40 or $50, it's likely a 64GB drive with a controller that fakes the available storage.
Run some of those listings through FakeSpot and ReviewMeta to see how they do at identifying scams.
I personally had a ton of amazon basics batteries leak in the packaging after 2 years of storage. I posted that review and amazon rejected it saying it didnt meet their community guidelines.
That made me distrust the review process and now I generally wont buy amazon branded products. However if there are bad reviews that tell the same consistent story and that go into enough detail, then they are likely not competitor plants.
Yep, exactly this.
Who cares what people that were happy with it think, generally. Hearing a few use cases is helpful to decide if it's fit for what you're trying to do, but it's generally very useful information. If I buy this I don't care all the ways it will make trees greener and shiny things shinier, I want to know if I give them $100 what is the _worst_ experience I will get.
Look at the negative reviews and see what kinds of issues people were having. Usually after skimming 5 or 10 you can get a pretty good feel for what kind of experience you are going to have.
> "These headphones that say 'for iPhone' and clearly show a lightning connector don't work with my Android! They should really say they don't work with Android! Garbage!"
> "I tried to use this blender to start my own 'will it blend' YouTube channel and when I put rocks in the blade got all chewed up and the company won't replace it! COMPANY DOESN'T STAND BEHIND THEIR PRODUCTS! AVOID!"
> "These $0.50 pens aren't half as good as my co-worker's $80 pen. Why bother."
> "Said it would get here Friday but it got here Monday, and UPS threw it over my fence and broke it!"
> "Ordered this desk chair and parts were missing!"
When the negative reviews are largely stuff like that (bought wrong thing, misuse of product, not understanding that cheap things are cheap for a reason, carrier issues), you know you can basically ignore them. The last one (product issues) kinda depends on whether there's a million of these, but generally if it's one or two and they don't say that they've tried to contact the company to resolve it I'm not too bothered.
When you start seeing reviews that explain (1) an actual issue with the product; (2) attempts to contact the company and/or get a refund; and (3) a poor response from the company... that's when I get worried. A few like:
> "Product arrived, of the ten included, only 4 worked. I contacted the seller and two weeks later they still haven't responded."
> "Product is very cheaply made. The first one worked for a week then the foo broke. The seller sent me a replacement, but then that one broke 2 days later."
And I start to look for something else.
If we had designed the internet differently (eg: with considerations for privacy, authenticity, verifiability) we could pool resources and have millions of people report on medications, treatments, nutrition, etc.
If a regular person uses the web we actually have today to do their own health research, they're playing dice with their life.
Now we get to see if Amazon is actually just really bad at filtering a bad problem, or really just DGAF as long as the fraud drives sales and commissions.
What we should see is wholesale delisting, banning, and prosecution of vendors, and banning and selected prosecution of fakers. What will we actually see?
I'd think Amazon would care when people abandon them because it is just too hard to find anything real, but the level of fraud on there indicates that Amazon prioritizes other metrics. When a few figure it out, it doesn't hit the traffic & sales numbers much. When many figure it out, it is likely too late. Did Bezos exit while the exiting was still good?
"In total, 13,124,962 of these records (or 7 GB of data) have been exposed in the breach, potentially implicating more than 200,000 people in unethical activities."
You do have to do research on everything you buy. User reviews are still a part of that research, just not nearly as much.
If you google info on what you want, you KNOW at least the top 25 results are all paid for in one way or another, probably more than that now.
Don't expect a corporation to watch your back. Amazon has made clear they give NO F's about the average human using their services, as long as they keep using it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMPdsKvhCOo (Netflix's Broken about Amazon counterfeits)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG-ULQrlx9s (Yelp Billion Dollar Bully Trailer)
Because there's a button for "Helpful" on each review, and the most helpful reviews more or less generally get voted to the top -- and there are almost always some really long, in-depth ones.
I don't even pay attention to star ratings anymore. I just read the top 10 reviews and get a pretty good sense of what specifically is good and bad about the product.
Even without fake reviews, star proportions were never that useful in the first place because they're not a random sampling of users, and people are way more likely to leave a review to complain than to praise, so it's biased no matter what.
Basically, as long as the stars are there, they capture most of the fraud?
I think the logistics would just be harder -- it's relatively simply to put a leaflet in the product advertising "leave a 5-star review, then e-mail us and get this bonus product/warranty/whatever."
Whereas to locate a specific review to mark "Helpful" would need to be via e-mail with a link to a specific review in question, coordinated across several of them, with so much volume that it outweighs the naturally "helpful" ones. I don't know, but I've never seen it happen.
Same thing with counterfeits which people claim are rampant on Amazon. Either I manage to avoid them or they're very good counterfeits, in which case I wouldn't care.
You can still read the real detailed reviews on the products you do look at, so you'll avoid buying a lemon, but you will be preferentially buying from review cheaters.
This information should be made public.
I'd love a browser plug-in which displays a warning when viewing a product from a vendor in this database, that the vendor has been known to pay for reviews, and likewise if viewing a review by someone in this database, a warning that the reviewer is a shill.
Another funny thing are all the new brands that pop up on Amazon (at least in Germany). They're often picked to sound vaguely familiar (e.g. Orfeld) and trust-inspiring, and their product pages portrait them as century-old companies. Often the products they sell are sourced from whitelabel manufacturers, so you have 20-40 brands offering the same product (for wildly different prices), maybe with some small variation in packaging and color.
Interestingly, some new companies like Anker have managed to build up a good "brand reputation" in 5-10 years, probably also due to the fact that they're no longer at the bottom of the trust chain.
That seems like a bad example. People are having a really hard time getting PS5s, and probably 50%+ are scalpers that don’t care about writing reviews. And cables are produced and bought at a much higher rate than video game consoles, anyway.
It's for decades, if not arguably always been a bunch of bullshit marketing for meaningless labels slapped on imported knock offs of questionable quality that you just hope they sample enough of for QA to keep the factory from slipping turds and razor blades into some of the boxes.
I used to agonize over finding "the best" but then I started to realize how much time I was wasting. Just find the cheapest option with the length you want and call it a day. Same goes for most things on Amazon.
For larger movies, or over a large enough timespan, the noise eventually gets drowned. But it's made IMDB reviews useless for deciding whether to watch new movies.
Not sure if this helps much, but I try to avoid buying from marketplace sellers. This is partly to avoid my personal data being shared with yet another company (it's been misused by marketplace sellers in the past) but also in the theory (hope!) that Amazon themselves will on average buy better products. After all, they have their reputation to maintain and have to deal with all the refunds if they sell shoddy goods.
Increasingly though, I'd rather just shop from a retailer that specialises in a particular type of product and has invested in their reputation.
(1) One can hope to combat this with technology and processes. But the number of people consuming the service versus the actual number of people and systems employed to safe guard customer trust is quite high.
(2) Understand the kingdom of humanity. There are always good/bad actors. The line that divides good/bad is also quite fickle. But we need more "good". We need to discuss this more.
Instead I check a few of the negative ones and see if there's a pattern that indicates some sort of systemic issue with the product.
For example, you could disallow changes in star ratings, but that would also prevent people from rating something only to change their minds when it broke three months later and you've lost useful information that way.
You could make sure all communication goes through Amazon, but that only counts for email. The seller has your physical address and therefore can offer you gift cards to change your mind, via a postal offer.
You could hide the names of reviewers, but then you risk losing the trust metagame where there are reviewers people trust.
You could allow only the verified purchaser of a product to comment, and only once, and that makes "review bombing" of competitors expensive but not impossible.
I imagine you would need a good outline of all types of different "fakes" (I am sure multiple sorts exist) and scams, then find the nastiest game theorists available and discuss what could and could not be done. The more I think about this, the more Amazon Marketplace morphs into Amazon Escrow.
Is there actually a law in the US (or others) that suggests leaving fake reviews could subject you to a $10,000 fine and/or jail time?
Asking for a friend.
If amazon could give me the scores from verified-purchasers, show me anonymized comments from verified-purchasers; I think I'd be ok.
What can be done to stop it? Maybe ONLY confirmed purchasers can review at all could help?
> Once the Amazon vendor confirms all reviews have been completed, the reviewer will receive a refund through PayPal, keeping the items they bought for free as a form of payment.
They are all confirmed...
Reviews are largely unverified claims with financial incentives. You bet they're useless.
It's pretty easy to spot fake amazon reviews with very little effort, and buy accordingly. Also, no matter how tempted I only buy directly from amazon and never from their 3rd party sellers; just for easy returns. So on the off chance I get burned, the product goes right back. It's not that big a deal. It's not like I was going to independently find the best product on my own, without the help of amazon, without some trial and error.
Maybe I'm too much of a sociopath. Allowing fake reviews is great. It vastly increases amazon's footprint, making sure that the things I buy are and remain easily returnable. Scammers gonna scam. Let them.
It's also easy to spot incompetent users that leave 1 star reviews due to their misunderstanding of the product. Or 5 star reviews of blu ray before it's even released. That kind of thing. You know, you have to actually read the reviews ok? It's not too much to ask, honestly.
You cannot police this kind of thing to any reasonable degree and maintain cost/performance ratio where it "needs" to be. Maybe it's a little too loose now, but any improvement is going to be modest plus it will breed better scammers.
I really rue the death of flash. It was sooo easy to filter flash and ignore the drek. Now where are we? I don't consider these fake reviews to be a problem; indeed they are a benefit. Keep them easy to spot, please.
I think if you had told us then that this sort of thing would eventually happen, we would not have believed you. This goes to show, perhaps, that imagining the significance of something when you're first building it is almost impossible. The notion that worldwide manufacturers and distributors would consider it so important to have "strong" amazon reviews that they would engage in this kind of behavior just would not have crossed our minds back when amazon itself had no significance.
So if you're building something right now, maybe stop and ask yourself "ok, so how does this all look if we end up taking over the world 25 years from now, and this thing is a gatekeeper between a lot of people and a lot of revenue?"
This is a fair concern, but I'd say that if you're building something right now, I think is better to worry more about getting your startup in a position to take over the world first and then deal with those concerns. Worrying about these big problems when you're small I would say is a bit of premature optimization.
The "do nothing ever without the foresight of a precog or else you are EVIL!" school of ethics never made any sense. It is just an excuse to be outraged and pin all of the world's problems on the tall poppy.
edit: here we go again, something negative about China and commment is being downvoted. Can Hacker News do something about Chinese bots?
IMO regulation for more transparency should be no issue with the anti-regulation fans except if they would be affected by transparency.
Much of the cost of stuff made in the first world is the cost of having a first world regulatory framework and workplace protections.
Sure, and the anti-regulation or anti-tax guys still demand that police protect their money and goods - so I can't understand when the anti-regulation fanatic is saying that free market will eventually solve this , transparency is too much of a burden or danger.
There's zero evidence that you were downvoted by "bots", and that sort of fantasy swipe is off topic here for very good reason.