Fictitious product reviews is becoming a wild social menace in the e-commerce ecosystem as unsuspecting brands face serious condemnation on questions of integrity by hundreds of thousands of their customers and clients. Amazon has recently decried the activities of some social media influencers and third party product pushers who are encouraging and making a killing from fictitious reviews of products listed on its platform. The US e-commerce giant also says it has been the target of these mongers for over five years now and it will be taking drastic legal actions against them.
According to a cyber-security news report on the technology express, Amazon has said it would be suing the admins of more than 10,000 Facebook groups, alleging that they encourage fraudulent evaluations of products on its website by offering cash or free goods in return for favourable comments.
The companies are reportedly in charge of posting false reviews on Amazon’s website in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan. Over 43000 people purportedly belonged to only one of these groups, ‘’Amazon Product Reviews’’ the report shows.
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It’s reported that although Amazon had earlier issued an official ban on incentivised reviews on its websites in October 2016, four years later in 2020, a Financial Times investigation found that as many as nine out of ten reviewers on its platform in the Uk were engaged in suspicious activity. The company says it has over 12,000 employees worldwide working to prevent fraud and abuse on its platform which includes fake reviews, and it’s reported over 10,000 fake reviews group to facebook owner Meta since 2020.
Amazon declares its position with adopting comprehensive methods including AI, data forensic and the criminal justice system to tackle the problem. The company says it uses a combination of advanced technology, expert investigators and continuous monitoring to detect fake reviews on its service, and over the past years it’s kicked hundreds of sellers off its platform for violating its policies including popular brands like RavPower and Aukey. It also adds it’s proactively stopped over 200 million suspected fake reviews in 2020.
‘’Our team stop million of suspicious reviews before they are ever seen by customers, and this law suit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media’’ the Vice President of Amazon’s Selling Partners Services, Dharmesh Mehta reveals. He also says proactive legal action targeting bad actions is one of many ways Amazon protect its customers by holding bad actors accountable.
