6 ms·

i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a n

i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a new account and prove you are human before it literally becomes impossible for new people to make real accounts." You say amazon has to police this more. I say amazon has tried and there is so much money to be made in jumping through the hoops to prove you are a human, that there is no way to win this war.

Zombieball 7y ago
I thought fake reviews were typically from humans? Bot protection / human verification seems like the wrong front to be tackling.
- andrewfromx 7y ago
  yeah, real humans blast past captcha and enter real heart warming text about how great the product is but don't mention they are being paid to write this review and pretend the product is good. Let's tackle the real issue and like connect wires from the human to the computer and like lie detector style measure their blood pressure, heart rate, sweat, or...
- luckylion 7y ago
  From my experience in Germany, it's 50/50. There are fake human reviews (Vine Club being a large part of it...), but there are also clearly auto-translated reviews (though they might be posted by humans). It's mostly on low-price items that are FBA'd or shipped directly from China.
jahnu 7y ago
Only allow reviews from verified purchasers
- milesskorpen 7y ago
  Doesn’t stop fake reviews.
  - zepto 7y ago
    Technically true, but it would stop bulk fake reviews.
- askar_yu 7y ago
  I am afraid verified purchases are being gamed too. Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews. This is not even mentioning incentivized reviwers who may be posting exaggerated (if not fake) reviews for promos, discounts, etc.
  - j-c-hewitt 7y ago
    One way in which Amazon has restricted this type of gaming is by restricting the ability of sellers to apply extreme discounting. Even legitimate attempts to do this such as liquidation can result in a warning from Amazon about rank/review manipulation. However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.
  - pyrosome 7y ago
    > Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews. This is called brushing and there have been several articles written about it. Scammers create fake accounts for real addresses and then ship fake merchandise to those addresses to get the "verified purchase" for their review. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-brushing-scam-couple-receives-packages-they-didnt-order/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-brushing-scam-couple-rec...
- jabo 7y ago
  Here’s how people still game verified purchases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399781
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  I got requests to do reviews for some of the products I received out of nowhere on amazon and other places. They told me they would send me the money if I can order more myself and leave a review. So I guess, no that won't help as much as you think it would.
- wincy 7y ago
  I bought a $25 product recently on Amazon. In the box there was a “coupon” that I’d get $20 back if I left a 5-star review for the product on Amazon. Instead I left a 1-star review saying that they were trying to game the system, and my review got REMOVED! I give up.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    Would it have upset you if they were asking for any review at all, instead of requiring a 5 star one?
    - TheRealDunkirk 7y ago
      "Asking for a friend," right?
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      > Would it have upset you if they were asking for any review at all, instead of requiring a 5 star one? That has largely the same result. Most satisfied customers don't bother to leave a review, so real reviews tend to skew towards people who have had issues. If you bribe satisfied customers into leaving a review then your reviews are no longer from the same sampling population as your competitors' reviews and you end up looking better than you really are by comparison. Plus, if the incentive isn't offered to everyone then people who get it (and then are disproportionately likely to leave a review) will tend to like the seller more because they liked receiving the incentive. It would only be fair if the same incentive was provided to all buyers for leaving reviews of all sellers.
  - brownbat 7y ago
    I've had people refund entire purchases and let me keep the item after I complain about a real defect, all just to avoid a low review. The most surreal instance was when I just asked a completely innocuous question and was offered a refund--clearly misunderstand my curiosity as a complaint. I love imagining the surreal consequences of a world where reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves... but that must be unsustainable.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  Verified purchases on Amazon aren't trustworthy, either. I live downstairs from someone who gives 5 star, raving reviews in return for "free samples". I'm not sure if it's for profit or for fun or what, but the rate at which Amazon delivery people deliver packages to our building is truly staggering.
- mns 7y ago
  I have a friend in Germany that is in a Facebook group for "testing" products from Amazon. They need to purchase all kind of weird and low quality stuff from unknown Chinese brands, they keep the product, get a refund through Paypal and leave a 5 star review. I told him it's kind of a bad thing to do, but hey, free 29 Euro earbuds. :) I knew this was a problem mostly in the US, but just like one of the initial commenters noted, it's starting to happen even in Germany, and Amazon is now filled with all kind of weird cheap brands that have 4,5+ stars and 500+ reviews, you can't get any proper stuff like a humidifier or some small kitchen accessories without being flooded with spam. Well, back to local shops and retailers.
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    The stuff they get from doing this is basically junk, a complete waste of resources. But the allure of "free stuff!" is just to great, even if they just end up throwing it in the trash. It's sickening.
kkaske 7y ago
If we really want to look at it from a money point of view... I would say Amazon has more money to make in keeping people from leaving their marketplace. It seems like that’s the point it’s either at or getting close to.
rubidium 7y ago
There are standard ways in industry of dealing with this problem. You verify your suppliers. Amazon doesn’t do this, and so kids eat lead and we get shitty stuff. The real makers get pissed. The scammers and amazon profit.
- j-c-hewitt 7y ago
  They do very frequently ask sellers to provide supplier documents. Amazon does very frequently do their own independent investigations into suppliers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of Amazon employees and contractors requesting supplier documents and following up with investigations all day every day. However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses. There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus. This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. Something that would help here is if Amazon would display the seller's country more prominently (or at all). It's a lot more problematic if you're not even aware that you're buying something from a seller in country without a functioning legal system.
    - j-c-hewitt 7y ago
lsc 7y ago
eh, but if this problem gets bad enough, it will kill amazon. If I order a certain brand of stuff off of amazon and I get something I can't use often enough, I'm going to order from another store. Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product I ordered. But you know what? safeway is just down the way, and they do deliveries, too. CVS does deliveries, and doesn't seem to have this issue. I mean, sure, an everything store is great, but if you have enough quality issues, I'm going to go back to maintaining accounts at each vendor. (all that said, the problem is below my threshold right now. I have been sent the wrong product, but... it doesn't happen often.)
- pmart123 7y ago
  I won’t buy anything I would ingest on Amazon anymore outside of Wholefoods. I’ll go to Target for things like Advil or toothpaste.
  - lsc 7y ago
    I personally trust all of amazon fresh enough to feed me? but yeah, it's probably good advice to not put things that come from the rest of amazon in your mouth. It's so weird to me, though 'cause here I am, totally willing to pay extra for convenience, and amazon seems to be throwing that premium away. Clearly, it's not an impossible problem to solve, 'cause basically every other major retailer (and for that matter, nearly all minor retailers) has solved it. It's only the places where they try to both sell their own stuff and be a marketplace of shady third party sellers where I have problems, and even then, most places that try to do both do a better job of segregating the real business from the 'let's compete with ebay' business than amazon does. I mean, it seems to me like this would be costing amazon money both in the short and long term. If I were an amazon shareholder, I'd demand they drop the third-party garbage until they figured out how to solve the problem as well as target does.
    - pmart123 7y ago
      I definitely agree that this could potentially cause long-term damage. Amazon could be one bad counterfeit away from destroying its brand. Brand trust ultimately matters for consumers making a default choice of what to buy or where to shop. To take an extreme example, as fears surrounding the Coronavirus spike, people are trying to buy 3M masks from Home Depot, not Amazon. It tells me consumers already have a trust issue building with Amazon when they are buying a product that needs to work.
eddieplan9 7y ago
If you cannot get everyone to review for all purchases, then the next best thing is to do random sampling by randomly choose buyers and purchases to get reviewed, and possibly pay them so that selected reviews are collected. I have fond memory of winning the moderation lottery at Slashdot [1]. The current system of free for all will only amplify the voice of the abusers. [1] https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
jxramos 7y ago
This is true, sometime I wonder about global economies exposing folks to the widespread corruption we hear about in so many other places in the world but haven't dealt with much first hand. I have to wonder if folks in corrupt environments just see these shady behaviors as the norm and so long as they're not axe murderers they're considered more or less decent people. Low standards and ethics eat systems based on honesty for breakfast.
PeterisP 7y ago
If Amazon had direct liability for selling counterfeit products, for example, if the Ove Glove company (first in the original article) could sue Amazon and recover all the revenue that went to the counterfeiters plus a penalty - I believe in this case Amazon would find a solution to ensure supplier verification. The problem is that currently it's profitable for Amazon to host goods from fraudsters; if (when) any get discovered, they kick them off but keep the proceeds. Society and law should ensure that Amazon loses money when hosting goods from fraudsters, so that the motivation is properly aligned.

Zombieball 7y ago

I thought fake reviews were typically from humans? Bot protection / human verification seems like the wrong front to be tackling.

andrewfromx 7y ago
yeah, real humans blast past captcha and enter real heart warming text about how great the product is but don't mention they are being paid to write this review and pretend the product is good. Let's tackle the real issue and like connect wires from the human to the computer and like lie detector style measure their blood pressure, heart rate, sweat, or...
luckylion 7y ago
From my experience in Germany, it's 50/50. There are fake human reviews (Vine Club being a large part of it...), but there are also clearly auto-translated reviews (though they might be posted by humans). It's mostly on low-price items that are FBA'd or shipped directly from China.

jahnu 7y ago

Only allow reviews from verified purchasers

milesskorpen 7y ago
Doesn’t stop fake reviews.
- zepto 7y ago
  Technically true, but it would stop bulk fake reviews.
askar_yu 7y ago
I am afraid verified purchases are being gamed too. Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews. This is not even mentioning incentivized reviwers who may be posting exaggerated (if not fake) reviews for promos, discounts, etc.
- j-c-hewitt 7y ago
  One way in which Amazon has restricted this type of gaming is by restricting the ability of sellers to apply extreme discounting. Even legitimate attempts to do this such as liquidation can result in a warning from Amazon about rank/review manipulation. However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.
- pyrosome 7y ago
  > Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews. This is called brushing and there have been several articles written about it. Scammers create fake accounts for real addresses and then ship fake merchandise to those addresses to get the "verified purchase" for their review. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-brushing-scam-couple-receives-packages-they-didnt-order/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-brushing-scam-couple-rec...
jabo 7y ago
Here’s how people still game verified purchases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399781
thrwaway69 7y ago
I got requests to do reviews for some of the products I received out of nowhere on amazon and other places. They told me they would send me the money if I can order more myself and leave a review. So I guess, no that won't help as much as you think it would.
wincy 7y ago
I bought a $25 product recently on Amazon. In the box there was a “coupon” that I’d get $20 back if I left a 5-star review for the product on Amazon. Instead I left a 1-star review saying that they were trying to game the system, and my review got REMOVED! I give up.
- cm2012 7y ago
  Would it have upset you if they were asking for any review at all, instead of requiring a 5 star one?
  - TheRealDunkirk 7y ago
    "Asking for a friend," right?
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > Would it have upset you if they were asking for any review at all, instead of requiring a 5 star one? That has largely the same result. Most satisfied customers don't bother to leave a review, so real reviews tend to skew towards people who have had issues. If you bribe satisfied customers into leaving a review then your reviews are no longer from the same sampling population as your competitors' reviews and you end up looking better than you really are by comparison. Plus, if the incentive isn't offered to everyone then people who get it (and then are disproportionately likely to leave a review) will tend to like the seller more because they liked receiving the incentive. It would only be fair if the same incentive was provided to all buyers for leaving reviews of all sellers.
- brownbat 7y ago
  I've had people refund entire purchases and let me keep the item after I complain about a real defect, all just to avoid a low review. The most surreal instance was when I just asked a completely innocuous question and was offered a refund--clearly misunderstand my curiosity as a complaint. I love imagining the surreal consequences of a world where reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves... but that must be unsustainable.
mumblemumble 7y ago
Verified purchases on Amazon aren't trustworthy, either. I live downstairs from someone who gives 5 star, raving reviews in return for "free samples". I'm not sure if it's for profit or for fun or what, but the rate at which Amazon delivery people deliver packages to our building is truly staggering.
mns 7y ago
I have a friend in Germany that is in a Facebook group for "testing" products from Amazon. They need to purchase all kind of weird and low quality stuff from unknown Chinese brands, they keep the product, get a refund through Paypal and leave a 5 star review. I told him it's kind of a bad thing to do, but hey, free 29 Euro earbuds. :) I knew this was a problem mostly in the US, but just like one of the initial commenters noted, it's starting to happen even in Germany, and Amazon is now filled with all kind of weird cheap brands that have 4,5+ stars and 500+ reviews, you can't get any proper stuff like a humidifier or some small kitchen accessories without being flooded with spam. Well, back to local shops and retailers.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  The stuff they get from doing this is basically junk, a complete waste of resources. But the allure of "free stuff!" is just to great, even if they just end up throwing it in the trash. It's sickening.

kkaske 7y ago

If we really want to look at it from a money point of view... I would say Amazon has more money to make in keeping people from leaving their marketplace. It seems like that’s the point it’s either at or getting close to.

rubidium 7y ago

There are standard ways in industry of dealing with this problem. You verify your suppliers. Amazon doesn’t do this, and so kids eat lead and we get shitty stuff. The real makers get pissed. The scammers and amazon profit.

j-c-hewitt 7y ago
They do very frequently ask sellers to provide supplier documents. Amazon does very frequently do their own independent investigations into suppliers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of Amazon employees and contractors requesting supplier documents and following up with investigations all day every day. However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses. There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus. This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. Something that would help here is if Amazon would display the seller's country more prominently (or at all). It's a lot more problematic if you're not even aware that you're buying something from a seller in country without a functioning legal system.
  - j-c-hewitt 7y ago

lsc 7y ago

eh, but if this problem gets bad enough, it will kill amazon. If I order a certain brand of stuff off of amazon and I get something I can't use often enough, I'm going to order from another store. Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product I ordered. But you know what? safeway is just down the way, and they do deliveries, too. CVS does deliveries, and doesn't seem to have this issue. I mean, sure, an everything store is great, but if you have enough quality issues, I'm going to go back to maintaining accounts at each vendor. (all that said, the problem is below my threshold right now. I have been sent the wrong product, but... it doesn't happen often.)

pmart123 7y ago
I won’t buy anything I would ingest on Amazon anymore outside of Wholefoods. I’ll go to Target for things like Advil or toothpaste.
- lsc 7y ago
  I personally trust all of amazon fresh enough to feed me? but yeah, it's probably good advice to not put things that come from the rest of amazon in your mouth. It's so weird to me, though 'cause here I am, totally willing to pay extra for convenience, and amazon seems to be throwing that premium away. Clearly, it's not an impossible problem to solve, 'cause basically every other major retailer (and for that matter, nearly all minor retailers) has solved it. It's only the places where they try to both sell their own stuff and be a marketplace of shady third party sellers where I have problems, and even then, most places that try to do both do a better job of segregating the real business from the 'let's compete with ebay' business than amazon does. I mean, it seems to me like this would be costing amazon money both in the short and long term. If I were an amazon shareholder, I'd demand they drop the third-party garbage until they figured out how to solve the problem as well as target does.
  - pmart123 7y ago
    I definitely agree that this could potentially cause long-term damage. Amazon could be one bad counterfeit away from destroying its brand. Brand trust ultimately matters for consumers making a default choice of what to buy or where to shop. To take an extreme example, as fears surrounding the Coronavirus spike, people are trying to buy 3M masks from Home Depot, not Amazon. It tells me consumers already have a trust issue building with Amazon when they are buying a product that needs to work.

eddieplan9 7y ago

If you cannot get everyone to review for all purchases, then the next best thing is to do random sampling by randomly choose buyers and purchases to get reviewed, and possibly pay them so that selected reviews are collected. I have fond memory of winning the moderation lottery at Slashdot [1]. The current system of free for all will only amplify the voice of the abusers. [1] https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

jxramos 7y ago

This is true, sometime I wonder about global economies exposing folks to the widespread corruption we hear about in so many other places in the world but haven't dealt with much first hand. I have to wonder if folks in corrupt environments just see these shady behaviors as the norm and so long as they're not axe murderers they're considered more or less decent people. Low standards and ethics eat systems based on honesty for breakfast.

PeterisP 7y ago

If Amazon had direct liability for selling counterfeit products, for example, if the Ove Glove company (first in the original article) could sue Amazon and recover all the revenue that went to the counterfeiters plus a penalty - I believe in this case Amazon would find a solution to ensure supplier verification. The problem is that currently it's profitable for Amazon to host goods from fraudsters; if (when) any get discovered, they kick them off but keep the proceeds. Society and law should ensure that Amazon loses money when hosting goods from fraudsters, so that the motivation is properly aligned.