In 2022, Amazon blocked more than 200 million suspicious reviews through proactive activities. Last year, the 125 million customers contributed almost 1.5 billion reviews. “Our goal is to ensure that every review in Amazon shops is trustworthy and reflects real customer experiences. For this reason, Amazon welcomes genuine reviews, whether positive or negative, but strictly prohibits fake reviews that may intentionally mislead customers with information that is not unbiased, authentic or intended for that product or service,” Amazon says. The US-based company has invested significant resources to proactively block fake reviews, using machine learning models that analyze thousands of pieces of data to detect risks – including relationships with other accounts, login activity, review history and other indications of unusual behaviour – and expert investigators who use sophisticated fraud detection tools to analyze and prevent fake reviews from appearing in the shop.
In recent years, these fake reviews have been fuelled primarily by the emergence of an illicit industry of “fake review brokers”. As our countermeasures have become more effective, the tactics of fake review brokers have also evolved in an attempt to evade detection. These brokers directly target consumers through websites, social media channels and encrypted messaging services, inviting them to write fake reviews in exchange for money, free products or other incentives. Sometimes they present themselves as legitimate businesses, with networks of hundreds of employees worldwide, to support their fraudulent schemes.
Fake promotions on Facebook groups
“Because this misconduct is often orchestrated outside the Amazon shop, it can be more difficult to detect, prevent and counter these miscreants if we go it alone. We are fighting review brokers hard and will continue to take legal action to permanently stop the scammers responsible for spreading such reviews,” the e-commerce company explains. Last year, Amazon took legal action against more than 90 wrongdoers worldwide who conveyed fake reviews, and we sued more than 10,000 Facebook group administrators who attempted to place fake reviews on our shops in exchange for money or free products. “By the end of May 2023, we had already surpassed that number, taking legal action against 94 wrongdoers, including scammers in the US, China and Europe.”
“In June, we added legal action against Nice Discount, Nice Rebate and 100 Rabatt, which operate in the US, UK and Germany, respectively. We also work with leading consumer protection organizations in Europe to identify and sue the worst offenders.” Amazon adds that our global prosecutions are starting to produce results as we have shut down some of the largest global brokers, including Matronex and Climbazon. The first Europe-wide criminal complaint was filed in Italy, also in 2022. In light of what it has learned over the years, collaboration with other actors and law enforcement actions, Amazon says it is ready for “greater collaboration between the public and private sectors” to limit the phenomenon as much as possible. For this reason, the company is pushing for “more information sharing on known wrongdoers” but also seeks “more clarity from the competent authority and more funds to prosecute wrongdoers”.
Together to win
As the specific situation varies from country to country, Amazon believes that governments should establish a supervisory authority or stronger enforcement tools to sanction fake review brokers in some countries. “We also support increased funding for law enforcement to develop additional technical expertise to investigate and eliminate these brokers.” Finally, stricter controls are called for on services that facilitate fake reviews. Fake review brokers use third-party services such as social media and third-party encrypted messaging services to facilitate their illicit schemes. “Amazon routinely investigates and reports abusive groups, misleading influencers and other malicious actors to these third parties.
In 2022, Amazon reported over 23,000 abusive social media groups, with over 46 million members and followers, that facilitated fake reviews on social media sites. While our efforts with third-party services have resulted in better and faster responses to our takedown requests from some service providers, all sites that could be used to facilitate these illicit activities should have robust, effective and fast notification and takedown processes.” Amazon wants to work with these companies to “help improve their detection methods and ensure they have better controls in place to detect these networks and proactively shut them down.
We also believe that together we can do more to educate customers about the solicitation of fake reviews and to ensure robust enforcement policies for fake review brokers.” “We cannot win this battle alone,” is the company’s cry. “It is only through collaborations with like-minded stakeholders in the public and private sectors that we can truly stop fake review brokers, tackle the problem at the source and help ensure the reliability of reviews across the industry.”
