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There are so many items that have reviews for obviously different items right now. I’ve seen it on a lot of COVID related items like no contact thermometers. S

There are so many items that have reviews for obviously different items right now. I’ve seen it on a lot of COVID related items like no contact thermometers. Should be easy to catch these.

paulie_a 6y ago
People take a good listing and rename everything for some fake piece of shit product. It's incredibly despicable people are finding a way to risk people's lives over covid for a dollar in profit
duskwuff 6y ago
That's a longstanding Amazon bug. As I understand it, a seller can "hijack" the reviews of another product that's no longer available by registering their product as a variant of the existing one.
- godelski 6y ago
  One person's bug is another person's feature.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    Jeffs feature
- _puk 6y ago
  Is there any way to report these? I found one obvious one the other day, but after about 15 minutes of searching couldn't work out how to report it without a seller account..
  - paulgb 6y ago
    I had a similar experience trying to report a product that extremely misrepresented itself and yet had ~5 stars from reviews that were obviously assigned from an unrelated product. My impression is that Amazon doesn't want to know: good reviews, fake or not, drive more transactions in the short term.
    - wongarsu 6y ago
      That seems very short sighed of Amazon. The viability of Amazon's open marketplace depends on the review system. Once all trust in reviews is gone people will increasingly shop somewhere else (whether that's a shop with more reliable reviews or one that carefully selects what they sell)
jschwartzi 6y ago
The other issue I'm seeing with thermometers is that they are saying "FDA Certified." The FDA doesn't certify anything. They provide Pre-Market Approval in a letter. A lot of these thermometers also aren't approved. They haven't done a 510k submittal to market these products in the US. Please check that any thermometer you buy on Amazon has a 510k approval letter logged by the FDA, or it may not provide accurate temperature information.

There are so many items that have reviews for obviously different items right now. I’ve seen it on a lot of COVID related items like no contact thermometers. Should be easy to catch these.

paulie_a 6y ago

People take a good listing and rename everything for some fake piece of shit product. It's incredibly despicable people are finding a way to risk people's lives over covid for a dollar in profit

duskwuff 6y ago

That's a longstanding Amazon bug. As I understand it, a seller can "hijack" the reviews of another product that's no longer available by registering their product as a variant of the existing one.

godelski 6y ago
One person's bug is another person's feature.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Jeffs feature
_puk 6y ago
Is there any way to report these? I found one obvious one the other day, but after about 15 minutes of searching couldn't work out how to report it without a seller account..
- paulgb 6y ago
  I had a similar experience trying to report a product that extremely misrepresented itself and yet had ~5 stars from reviews that were obviously assigned from an unrelated product. My impression is that Amazon doesn't want to know: good reviews, fake or not, drive more transactions in the short term.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    That seems very short sighed of Amazon. The viability of Amazon's open marketplace depends on the review system. Once all trust in reviews is gone people will increasingly shop somewhere else (whether that's a shop with more reliable reviews or one that carefully selects what they sell)

jschwartzi 6y ago

The other issue I'm seeing with thermometers is that they are saying "FDA Certified." The FDA doesn't certify anything. They provide Pre-Market Approval in a letter. A lot of these thermometers also aren't approved. They haven't done a 510k submittal to market these products in the US. Please check that any thermometer you buy on Amazon has a 510k approval letter logged by the FDA, or it may not provide accurate temperature information.