Amazon is taking legal action against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that claim to facilitate fake reviews for products on its platform by promising money or free products in exchange for positive reviews. The groups are allegedly responsible for fake reviews on Amazon sites in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan. the company has announced. Only one such group, called “Amazon Product Review”, reportedly had more than 43,000 members.
The e-commerce giant has a well-documented problem with fake reviews, which has become more pressing as third-party market sellers make up an increasing share of the revenue on its platform. It has officially banned incentivized ratings in October 2016but four years later in 2020, a Financial times research found that as many as nine of the top ten reviewers on its platform in the UK were involved in suspicious activity. A roadside research shed light on some of the tactics used in the network of Facebook groups to enable fake reviews.
The e-commerce giant has been battling these inauthentic reviews for years and is taking legal action against the… brokers who help facilitate she as well as the Amazon sellers that they buy. In today’s press release, the company says it has more than 12,000 employees worldwide who try to prevent fraud and abuse on its platform, including fake reviews, and says it has reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Facebook owner Meta since 2020.
Amazon says it uses a combination of “advanced technology, expert researchers and continuous monitoring” to detect fake reviews on its service. In the past year, it has kicked hundreds of merchants off its platform for violating its policies, including popular brands like RavPower and Aukey. It says it proactively stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews by 2020.
“Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’ve ever been seen by customers, and this lawsuit is taking it a step further to track down culprits on social media,” said Amazon’s Vice President of Selling Partner Services Dharmesh Mehta. “Proactive legal action targeting malicious parties is one of many ways we protect customers by holding adversaries accountable.”
Aside from Amazon, the social media company Meta is also strengthening its policy against fake reviews, and the UK competition regulator is also investigating the issue. Amazon is calling for greater collaboration between organizations in both the public and private sectors to address the problem.