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Amazon Review Scam

• afinlayson 6y ago
  Wait until you hear about how some people get given free products to review them. Amazon has no incentive to police their reviews, because they just want volume.
  • fairity 6y ago
    > Amazon has no incentive to police their reviews, because they just want volume. Amazon, the company, has plenty of incentive to police their reviews. Fake reviews deteriorate customer trust and drive customers away in the long run. The problem is there are two parties who have large incentives to create fake reviews: 1) Merchants 2) Executives whose compensation is tied to short-term results . Right now these two parties with adverse incentives seem to be winning the battle, but it wouldn't surprise me if this changed in the near future. Yelp's battle against fake reviews and Google's battle against SEO spam both come to mind as examples where the company was largely able to get things under control and aligned with their best interests. There will always be an escalating cat and mouse game between the "company's police" and the "fakers", but Yelp and Google seem to stay one step ahead while Amazon is one step behind.
    • Supermancho 6y ago
      > Fake reviews deteriorate customer trust and drive customers away in the long run. When there's no equivalent alternative, this inverts. This is why it the tweet changes nothing.
    • SpaceL10n 6y ago
      I wouldn't exclude the possibility that this is being done deliberately and not merely as an outcome of the problem you described. Maybe they have the data to support the decision to allow a measured amount of fake reviews in. If well-reviewed products sell better than under-reviewed products, and the number of under-reviewed products keeps growing month after month, slowing sales growth, Amazon might see more $$$ down the road if they do allow a few blemishes into their reviews on under-reviewed products.
  • blfr 6y ago
    Wait until you hear about how some people get given free products to review them. This has been the norm in many industries back when Amazon was still selling books (and reviewers would also get them from the publisher).
    • WalterBright 6y ago
      Much longer ago than that. It was normal in the 80s for computer companies to send out free review products, and I expect this has been going on long before that, even. It's commonplace for book publishers going back to at least the 1960's. I know this because my dad had many review copies of books.
      • bluGill 6y ago
        there difference is those reviewers said they got the copy for free. At least they do now, it may not have been the case in the past (you go back a lot of years). I think disclouser is actually US law so if you are involved in these scams you might find yourself in legal trouble...
  • bootlooped 6y ago
    To give them a bit of credit, Amazon did ban giving reviewers cheap or free products in exchange for reviews a few years ago. They also shut down 3rd party sites that were facilitating the buying and selling of reviews. https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/amazon-bans-most-users-from-writing-reviews-in-exchange-for-free-discounted-items/ https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/amazon-bans-most... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32251698 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32251698 I bet there is more they could be doing, but you can probably never totally solve the problem.
    • therealx 6y ago
      They use targed ads on Facebook to find new rectruits.
    • ArtDev 6y ago
      I don't think they follow up. I just received an item that offered me a free gift for a five star review last week (I didn't do it).
  • Nition 6y ago
    In this case they did police his review though. They removed his review that mentioned the five-star review bribe attempt.
• martin-adams 6y ago
  Amazon really do have a problem. Often I see people reviewing different products to the one on the page. Sellers are swapping out listings to pump the reviews and this is in plain sight.[1] Worst still, I've seen Amazon produce a banner with the phrase "Dispatched and Sold by Amazon" - gives you the guarantee to receive original and genuine[2] This means they know that other listings may not be original or genuine. So to solve this, they promote their own items as genuine, despite them owning the whole platform. 1. https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1169905424612507649?s=20 https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1169905424612507649?... 2. https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1305398394274414593?s=20 https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1305398394274414593?...
  • onion2k 6y ago
    Amazon really do have a problem. No, they don't. This is simple - Amazon have optimized their product to maximize their profit. Amazon have a shop that people continue to use despite the fact that it's full of scams and knock off goods. Amazon make huge profits from that, so they have no problem with it at all. It only becomes a problem if the customers stop shopping there, and that's not looking very likely. It's Amazon's customers who have a problem. Don't expect Amazon to fix it.
    • Judgmentality 6y ago
      You could say the same thing about Sears 50 years ago.
      • bigiain 6y ago
        In 50 years I suspect Bezos thinks he’ll be fighting robot wars against Musk on Mars. I seriously doubt he cares.
    • kortilla 6y ago
      > No, they don't. That’s stupidly pedantic. Of course they do, they just aren’t optimizing to solve it. If someone says, “United has a legroom problem”, they most certainly mean the legroom is uncomfortable for passengers and everyone knows exactly what they mean. The fact that United has optimized for maximum capacity is not relevant. They still have the problem.
• advisedwang 6y ago
  Review the product, get $10, then delete the review!
  • chickenpotpie 6y ago
    Even better, change it to 1 star
• liquidise 6y ago
  Every negative review i have tried to leave on Amazon has been denied for similarly vague reasons. This is not a new trend and goes back at least a decade. Receiving damaged products, wrong products, overtly used (skin buildup on "new" keyboards, etc). While this should represent a long-term concern for Amazon but it is not a short-term one. For now they are benefited by potential buyers viewing their products as superior. Incidentally, Amazon's real failure for me as a consumer is their delivery service. In spite of spending hours on the phone with their logistics departments, Amazon's delivery people have a roughly 33% success rate getting a package to my door, compared to nearly 100% for USPS, UPS and Fedex. This has diverted thousands of dollars in the last year alone to other vendors or in-person stores, as i preemptively avoid the frustration associated with waiting for a package that never comes and then having to chase down a refund or another shipment.
  • thinkling 6y ago
    > Receiving damaged products, wrong products, overly used (skin buildup on "new" keyboards, etc). I think Amazon considers these issues with the vendor, not issues with the product proper. So they would want you to report those things in a vendor review rather than in a product review. I've definitely submitted negative product reviews and had them go live. And obviously there are lots of negative reviews out there on lots of products.
    • alistairSH 6y ago
      I think Amazon considers these issues with the vendor... When it's mostly mixed inventory, and one of the vendors is inserting garbage into the mix, why wouldn't a future buyer want to know that the whole mix is corrupt?
      • InitialLastName 6y ago
        It's not about what future buyers want. _Amazon_ would like their buyers to forget that their entire inventory has been corrupted by counterfeits and open-box/used products sold as new.
      • 6y ago
• atum47 6y ago
  i left a comment here the other day telling this: bought a airdots (wireless earbuds), seller sent me fake ones, when questioned about it said the guy who posted the product got the real ones and sent fake ones instead. i left a review describing this purchase experience and my review weren't approved.
  • AnssiH 6y ago
    That's expected. Product reviews must be about the product in the listing, and you didn't actually receive it so you can't reasonably review it. Product reviews are not seller-specific so fulfillment issues cannot be described there as they do not apply to all sellers. Seller issues can be posted in seller feedback, instead, which affects seller rating. IOW, the product reviews must be something that the manufacturer did well/poorly and thus apply to all buyers, regardless of who is the seller.
    • atum47 6y ago
      what are you talking about? i bought a wireless earbuds and I received fake ones. How come a review warning other buyers about that seller is not relevant? Again, I received the product but it was knockoff. Probably a scam. If I hadn't open a dispute I would've paid full price for a cheap product.
      • AnssiH 6y ago
        The review you post against a product would apply to all sellers, not just the one you tried to buy one from. That's why the separate seller-specific ratings exist for seller-specific issues.
• cle 6y ago
  I have been increasingly suspicious of the review quality on Amazon as well. Coupled with the poor search functionality and the increasing amount of "sponsored" stuff that's inundated every page, I don't have much confidence in my ability to find products that meet my search criteria anymore. I feel increasingly like I'm at Best Buy--as soon as I enter, I'm accosted by sales pitches that are uninterested in actually helping me find what I want. For a company that prides itself as "customer obsessed", it seems like lip service these days. That said, I don't find this post very convincing at all. > I made a purchase... > So Amazon lets sellers pay for fake reviews... Sorry this is an incoherent argument (generalizing from a single data point). I've heard plenty of anecdotes of this stuff (maybe a couple dozen?) but even that's not nearly enough for me to feel confidently say "this is a widespread problem". I realize the data may be hard to obtain, but until we have it, I don't really think we can confidently make such a conclusion.
  • rblatz 6y ago
    I’ve probably purchased 10 products this year from Amazon that have a card tucked in the packaging offering to give me something free in return for a 5 star review and sending them proof I left it.
  • mthoms 6y ago
    More anecdata: Roughly 30% of the technical products I've ordered in the past year have arrived with one of these cards. As with Colin (the author of the tweet), I'm also in Canada. It makes me wonder if the practice is more prevalent here? Speculation: Maybe Amazon's efforts to combat this (if any) are not as strong in Canada?
    • zrobotics 6y ago
      Not just a CA thing, roughly half of my Amazon purchases in the US have included these cards as well; the first time I remember seeing one of these cards begging for a review was in mid 2017. Oddly, that was also one of the first clearly counterfeit products I received from Amazon. Order was for some Nalgene lab solvent wash bottles, but the product I received had extremely poor printing for the warning diamond and were unvented. The reason I remember the card was that they offered $20 for a review, and IIRC I paid ~$15 for the product.
• stevebmark 6y ago
  I had a similar experience, for an "Amazon's Choice" recommended popular camera knock-off. The camera came with an insert saying they would give you a "free gift" if you left a four or five star review. I contacted Amazon support with images and they said they would address it. They didn't and the product still stands as "Amazon's Choice." I tried to leave a review saying the reviews were fake and got a warning (obviously seller initiated) that those types of reviews violated Amazon's policies. Amazon clearly enables review scams.
  • MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
    It may not even be official policy, but corruption. If you know the right guys at Amazon HQ, maybe you can get inside „assistance“ for certain arrangements.
  • mikestew 6y ago
    I'm convinced that "Amazon's Choice" means that it is Amazon's choicest item for high margins [0], and most certainly does not mean that their staff of highly discriminating reviewers decided that this is the best of the bunch. Which is why the item to which you refer is still "Amazon's Choice": everyone's making money except the end consumer. [0] In fact, I seem to recall an article that did an analysis of some sort and came to that conclusion. Hell if I can find it, though.
    • colinmhayes 6y ago
      I doubt there's anyone that doesn't think this
      • IshKebab 6y ago
        Probably not many and probably nobody here but I reckon there are at least a few non-technical people that think Amazon employees have actually chosen them. I mean, the very first time you come across it there's no reason to think otherwise really. Search for a padlock, and one is "Amazon's choice"? Ok sure they could easily have had someone try all the padlocks and pick a decent one. It's only when you find "Amazon's choice" of "3mm hand reamer" or whatever that it becomes obvious it's a scam.
• seanwilson 6y ago
  Do any shops offer incentives like vouchers and perks to leave reviews and moderate other reviews? Would something like this drown out the fakes and balance out e.g. the bias that unhappy customers are much more likely to leave a review than any other? Seems an obvious thing to try but I've never seen it. Sometimes I see people leaving reviews for the most mundane items like tin foil and vegetable oil, and wonder why they do it.
  • mns 6y ago
    There is a big shop in Germany, Otto, that encourages you with a €1 bonus for every review that you leave for a purchased product. Surprisingly the reviews are quite ok and you can find a lot of products with 2-3 stars on average and anywhere from 10 to 500 reviews. The problem is they also started offering products through resellers (mostly the actual brands that make the products, but I'm afraid they will also turn into a marketplace soon enough).
• FilterSweep 6y ago
  I love how all the highest rated “Amazon’s Choice” items for a USB-C Hub all have Q&A feedback saying the HDMI port doesn’t work, but the reviews saying the same thing get scrubbed How do we even find reliable dongles/hubs these days
  • poyu 6y ago
    Buy them from the manufacturer themselves. Anker, Monoprice etc. Or places like B&H, Adorama, Best Buy, at least you get good customer service if it doesn't work.
    • FilterSweep 6y ago
      Is there a resource / someone’s Medium who will break down all of the legit manufacturers? I’m aware of some for RPi like Jeff Geerling has great microSD card reviews Btw I went with Anker because it had the least reported issues from Amazon (after extensive filtering on my part)
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Don't use Amazon? Or pre/post-pandemic, go to a store and try the product or talk to a human about it? I haven't had any issues buying from web shops anywhere in the EU and with physical stores the owner is (if nothing else) invested in the property and will probably sell you decent stuff. Never had a used product sold as new, untrustworthy reviews (beyond that most individual reviews are not representative of the true population), or other such problems that I read about Amazon on HN. Of course, you need to know what features or specs you're looking for or you'll still get, say, painfully slow sd cards for nearly the same price as the faster ones, but that's not necessarily a quality issue: the product doesn't falsely advertise being fast. Living in Germany now, Amazon is a very dominant player here and, not speaking German that well yet, it's a bit harder to find other shops that sell a random item. Amazon is an easy first stop but they make it super hard to do comparative research (sort by price does not sort by price, no useful filters, inconsistent or missing product info, etc.) and so I usually do end up putting it in google/ddg instead and finding an alternative store to buy from, or get something second-hand (within reason). Or just go over to one of three computer stores that are within walking distance from home or work. That's how I'd find reliable dongles/hubs these days...
• jchook 6y ago
  Sounds like he wrote a seller review and posted it as a product review.
  • paxys 6y ago
    How is "don't buy this product, it definitely has fake reviews" not a product review?
    • kube-system 6y ago
      That is, quite plainly, not a statement about the product.
  • cperciva 6y ago
    The product arrived with a card offering money in exchange for fake reviews. This wasn't something the vendor sent me after the fact. It was inside the sealed box.
    • kube-system 6y ago
      I have received similar offers before inside of my Amazon packages -- offers that mentioned a particular seller's name on them, for products that have multiple sellers listed on Amazon's website.
    • jchook 6y ago
      So you think it was the manufacturer?
      • cperciva 6y ago
        I'm 100% certain of it, yes.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
  • deleted 6y ago
• gavman 6y ago
  This sort of gaming is rampant on Amazon. My own experience: A friend of my wife introduced her to a woman who was a representative of a well known brand for home goods/kitchen gadgets. If you bought an item off Amazon of their brand, the woman would Venmo you for the value of the item provided you left a review. It went unsaid but understood anything less than five stars would mean the relationship was over. They also had a few other rules about your Amazon account to "qualify" (had to be personal, you had to review a certain number of other products, etc) to try to bypass any flags getting raised.
  • paxys 6y ago
    I had the same experience with an acquaintance. Their reasoning is that given how Amazon's algorithms work (and how much they favor review count), it is impossible for any new product to get noticed at all unless you spend money to get those first set of 5-star reviews. It's basically an advertising budget.
    • criddell 6y ago
      I wonder if Amazon could fight this by expiring old reviews? Don't delete them, but weight them at zero. Products change over time and I'm usually more interested in recent reviews.
      • piva00 6y ago
        What kind of product changes over time without changing SKU? Apart from software.
        • criddell 6y ago
          Products made by companies that are cutting costs.
  • tinyhouse 6y ago
    That's the Internet today. All important review sites have these problems. Most businesses today live and die on customer reviews, so they do everything they can in order to maintain high rating. There's obv a lot Amazon and others can do to fight it. But it's a very hard problem, as your example suggests. The worse part is doctor reviews. Some people pick their doctor based on fake reviews. That's why when I buy things I usually look into the negative reviews first, then the time period of the positive reviews (many reviews too close is usually a red flag), the total number of reviews a product has (e.g., some items have too many reviews), and also search the product on other sites to see maybe there's something I missed. I also rarely order something from a seller with < 90% rating on Amazon. For something like picking a doctor, I always go with recommendations from people I know. I also check online reviews, but only read the negative ones.
• PaulKeeble 6y ago
  I have seen worse than just review scams. I have been offered bribes to change reviews for products as a precursor to getting replacements sent out. I had to demand Amazon refund me that one as they didn't have an issue with it! I have been exposed to it a lot over the past few months trying to buy a 3080 graphics card. Three sellers have been executing a scam I don't quite understand, beyond a data grab, but I am just not seeing how they benefit. They list the card, you buy it and then they cancel the order 5 minutes later. Then they put the cards up again the next day and the next and keep doing the same thing each time getting 5-10 peoples worth of data. They never actually sell the cards. So far Amazon has done nothing about those companies either. I have been receiving a feisty set of new spam on my amazon email address though so I think it may just be a GDPR breach thing to spam emails but I can't see it being valuable for so few people a day. Then there is the "we have shipped your product and it will be with you at December 21st" on a new 5800x from launch day. The mail came along with a DPD delivery number that wasn't even the right length. I can't cancel it because its been shipped, except shipping within the EU even by donkey doesn't take 2 months. Amazon hasn't done anything about them either. Clearly blatant fraud when reported to Amazon is not dealt with so it isn't a wonder the entire platform is now full of fraudsters everywhere. I have been a long time Amazon prime customer, their service was second to none. But the past year even before human malware kicked off has been an increasing problem and its time I stopped. In the instances where I have come across fraud Amazon didn't deal with it, that is my experience of it.
  • therealx 6y ago
    I had the bribe thing happen, over such low level items too! I also had really blatent knockoffs of $500 headphones. Amazon sweapt that under the rug even though I had tons of proof and info.
    • PaulKeeble 6y ago
      Mine was the same, it was over a $50 item. But when they know Amazon isn't concerned about blatant bribes to buy good reviews they have nothing to worry about on that side and the bigger concern is being called out in reviews of their store and the item being slammed. I guess bad reviews hurt their business quite a bit. Amazon needs to take this threat to its business seriously and I am seeing no signs they intend to.
• yumraj 6y ago
  Yep, I had purchased some earbuds for $10 plus tax. It had a similar card for a Gift card for $15, wherein I was supposed to place a review and send the proof to a gmail address. They were junk, like really really bad, but if you check the reviews you will think that they were the best earbuds under the Sun. Some were simple review, some were from audiophiles with several paragraphs of details. When I had purchased there were 0 review and the price as ~$10. After the reviews, all 5 star, accumulated, the price had jumped to about $15.
• cptskippy 6y ago
  I use unique emails for everything so when I started getting spam to my amazon email, I knew it was leaked via amazon. The spam however was requests for reviews in exchange for compensation. I reported this to Amazon and their response was basically to threaten me if I participated.
• Finnucane 6y ago
  I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon in almost a year. It turns out you can live without it.
  • bromuro 6y ago
    Yet when we buy from them, we’d like real product reviews. (I do buy there few times a year).
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  I've seen such offers for future discounts or bonus gifts for reviews several times on products I received from Amazon. Increasingly, the low quality of products, the flea market like shopping experience, and concerns about Amazon getting too big/powerful have led me to reduce how much I shop there. I was thinking it would be a big challenge to wean myself off Amazon but it has actually been very easy since several competing retailers are reasonably convenient and many companies that manufacture the actual products have easy direct online purchasing options.
• Luc 6y ago
  For reviews it’s best to use Amazon Germany. I don’t know what it is in the German psyche, but they tell it like it is and tend to leave more useful reviews than other localities. For now, at least.
• shortstuffsushi 6y ago
  A similarly shady/slimy local SEO vendor here called iNET encourages their clients to do the same thing - for instance, a siding company they work with says to their customers, "we'll give you $200 off if you leave us good Google reviews." Unfortunately, this works exceedingly well, as evidenced by their disproportionate mountain of five star reviews.
  • mikestew 6y ago
    I wonder what happens if you retort with "give me $200, and I don't leave a 1-star review explaining where the 5-star reviews came from".
• nickjj 6y ago
  This isn't limited to Amazon. Stuff like this has been going on forever, even before the internet took off. For example, most trade services in real life will offer you a gift in return for a referral. A referral is in my opinion a lot stronger than a review because now you're personally vouching for something to a friend or family member. Amazon reviews are basically a distributed version of that with less individual weight, but effective in the end due to volume. I would never in a million years ever leave a positive review in return for a gift, but if there's a service that I enjoy using and really believe in it, I'll happily refer it to friend with or without compensation and if the company wants to compensate me, I'll accept it. Like a dentist giving you movie tickets or DigitalOcean giving you hosting credits, etc.. It's a fine line tho because that referral logic doesn't apply back to leaving reviews. It's an interesting topic because so much of it is based on "feel" rather than black and white rules.
• chimen 6y ago
  I work in the proxy business. Almost everything about reviews on the internet is fake and should not be trusted. I don't know how I would fix it but I think I would charge a fee small for leaving a review. Some of my clients have thousands of social media accounts boosting each other's postings.
  • aaronblohowiak 6y ago
    Verified unreturned purchases only?
    • chimen 6y ago
      Exactly that is being addressed in this article. Sellers still trying to move the needle by any means - this case: offering a $10 reward
  • deegles 6y ago
    I know there are tens of millions of products on Amazon, but I wonder how many reviews a dedicated team of in-house of reviewers could do per day. Amazon could even charge for the privilege of having their (ostensibly) unbiased team review the product, or prioritize them based on sales trends etc. It feels like shoppers are already indirectly doing this by buying the in-house Amazon brands.
    • crispyporkbites 6y ago
      Which.co.uk is basically this, it’s great but they can’t always keep up with every product category
• nbrempel 6y ago
  Amazon reviews are not trustworthy. I use https://fakespot.com https://fakespot.com to help me sort through the fake reviews. In my experience, it works pretty well.
• momirlan 6y ago
  Amazon became just a bazaar, no quality products, actually mostly chinese fakes. Same way for reviews
• msoad 6y ago
  There is a whole network of fake reviewers, agents and sellers that pump up products on Amazon. It is extremely easy to find those people. A simple search for "Amazon Reviews" on Facebook will take you to a few open Facebook Groups. Here are a few examples: https://www.facebook.com/amazonrrc/ https://www.facebook.com/amazonrrc/ https://www.facebook.com/AmReSe/ https://www.facebook.com/AmReSe/ I was curious and contacted one of them. They sent proof screenshots that they indeed refund you if you buy a products and leave a good review. They instructed me to search for specific term to find the product instead of giving me a link to click on. For Amazon, this is easy to prevent because it is so easy to find sellers that are engaging in that sort of activity. As always, if you follow the money, Amazon has little interest in doing so...
  • kbenson 6y ago
    > As always, if you follow the money, Amazon has little interest in doing so... They had little short-term interest in doing so. Now people know the reviews are fake, and Amazon's reputation WRT finding good products and believing you'll get an authentic product is edging towards the gutter. I know I'm very careful of what I'm buying from whom on Amazon now. Combined with them not always being the cheapest for a long time now, and there's less and less reason for me to give them first consideration.
    • iwasakabukiman 6y ago
      Same here. Recently, if it's anything that's health related, I absolutely avoid Amazon because of the mass of fake products out there. I needed some vitamins recently and my first thought was that I'm better off paying CVS or Walgreens prices and being practically guaranteed that the product is legit, versus trying to weed through the fake reviews and counterfeit products on Amazon. That thought has occurred with increasing frequency over the past few years as Amazon continues to completely ignore the issue.
      • hansvm 6y ago
        Do be aware that CVS and Walgreens stock homeopathic garbage for any symptom that doesn't have a good OTC remedy, and aside from a little fine print and weird units on the "active ingredients" the packaging is identical to real medicine.
• thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > So... @amazon lets sellers pay for fake reviews, but doesn't let other customers warn you about fake reviews. I feel like the thing to do here is provide the actual review, with disclosures at the top and bottom saying "I was paid to write a 5 star review".
• jariel 6y ago
  Folks Jeff Bezos is well aware of this, ergo, his lack of action is tacit support. It blows my mind to this day how confusing and ridiculous even the Amazon UI is, the titles don't make sense, the layout is inconsistent, some things have prices, some don't, you're not quite sure 'who' you're buying from, product details are all over the place. It's one of the most offensive UI's out there. I believe that at least some parts of it are a mess 'on purpose' as a set of dark patterns. This is Bezos.
• ilamont 6y ago
  Same thing happened to me in September after purchasing a $35 webcam for my high school sophomore from Amazon. The box contained a $20 "gift card" if I emailed proof of my 5-star review. I documented everything including photos, my exchange with Amazon customer service, and the confirmation from the seller that they would pay me $20 for a 5-star review (I did not do this ... I was appalled at the situation and more than a little angry that I had been tricked by bogus reviews). Here's what happened when I reported the seller: Me: Hi. The box for this product contained a card that says “Amazon $20 gift card” and looks like a gift card, but the back says I have to give a 5 star review and send my order information to an outlook email address. Is this legitimate? Is it really a $20 Amazon gift card? Amazon: Thank you so much for your information on this, I will certainly pass it along here so that we can check this promotion or offer directly with the seller. Because I am not seeing that advertised on the item at all And would not be capable of confirming if that is a legit Amazon gift card because, I do not see that offer on the item Me: So what should I do? Amazon: My best suggestion would be to contact the seller directly for this through this link [redacted] So that you can confirm directly with them if this is legit or not Certainly giving away gift cards for good reviews is not professional And I have to report the seller for that Me: I thought this type of offer was forbidden by Amazon’s own policies for sellers. But I will contact them using the link you sent to ask them if that’s what you recommend. Even though the CSR reported the seller, and I confirmed with the seller through Amazon's own communication system that they were paying $20 per 5 star review, nothing happened to the seller. The item (a webcam) is still for sale on Amazon, with thousands of additional 5-star reviews - more than 8,000 now, compared to 3,266 when I let Amazon know how they were gaming the reviews in September. Once again, the good guys (in the case, customers and honest sellers) lose out while the bad guys win, with no repurcussions. More: http://leanmedia.org/amazon-is-broken/ http://leanmedia.org/amazon-is-broken/
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    I had a similar experience with Amazon support. I posted a review of a power strip that caught fire, with a picture of the scorch marks. The seller reached out repeatedly to me via email asking what they could do to get it taken down, including monetary offers and (after I rejected their approaches several times) thinly veiled "looks like you're having fun at the beach this weekend" references to my social media feeds in what I presume was an attempt to creep me out. I reported them to Amazon. Seller and listing (with my review, so far) are still there.
• jb1991 6y ago
  I've gotten to the point where I can't even order from Amazon without strong likelihood of getting a counterfeit or just garbage. There is so much wrong with that site, it is the epitome of Buyer Beware and shame on them, and shame on all of us, that this is happening.
• smusamashah 6y ago
  See reviewmeta.com it analyzes Amazon reviews
• rumham 6y ago
  This is super common, I know multiple people who do this. Even crazier, a few people I know who do this worry their account will be flagged for only giving 5 star reviews. So, to prevent suspicion, when they ACTUALLY buy something they give it 1 or 2 stars just to balance things out. Thus, any merchants who don't buy reviews get additionally penalized.
• blibble 6y ago
  had several items with that exact card, $10 "refund" on a $4 item definitely legitimate
• modeless 6y ago
  I tried to leave a positive review for a product I liked, and Amazon blocked it as fraudulent seemingly at random. Then when I ordered a second one, the box came with one of these cards inside. I guess Amazon is making a token effort to fight these, but it's clearly not working in the slightest. Many other scams are also alive and well there. The shipping and return policy are what keep me there; the store is crap. I wonder if there's an opportunity to make an alternative storefront for Amazon with its own reviews and decent search. Probably would violate the ToS or some other lame thing.
• AdamGibbins 6y ago
  I'm not surprised. I'm within the top 70k reviewers in the UK, I constantly get emails (I've no clue where they're getting my email address) from random sellers offering free products in return for reviews. They don't explicitly ask for positive, but its clear what's what they're wanting. Typically they'll request you buy the product and then paypal you a refund once you've done the review.
  • crispyporkbites 6y ago
    How many products have you reviewed? Why do you do it?
    • AdamGibbins 6y ago
      I just review almost everything I buy, why would you not. According to my Amazon profile I've only reviewed 220 things.
      • crispyporkbites 6y ago
        I am not sure if that was rhetorical, but reviewing things a) takes time and b) builds up Amazons moat with no benefit to the reviewer
        • AdamGibbins 6y ago
          It doesn't take much time, no more than a minute or two, I don't buy much. No its true I get no value from it, but there's many things humans do they get no direct value from. I read Amazon reviews, I get value from them some of the time, I do use them to inform my purchasing decisions - I'm paying it forward.
• Raphmedia 6y ago
  This is not limited to Amazon. I once received an email asking me to review a Magento plugin (on the Magento Marketplace) after commenting positively on their forum. They promised a $75 Amazon gift card in exchange.
• fishingisfun 6y ago
  so many brands on amazon are just junk. the whole concept of branding is worthless because the same stuff is being sold by "different" brands. i rather stick to known names
  • zrobotics 6y ago
    Doesn't that support the thinking that brand names are actually worth something? I agree, if I'm shopping for something like a USB cable most of the brands are companies I absolutely don't give a damn about. However, if I'm shopping for a cable I don't want to have to figure out which one actually has enough copper to support the amperage demands, so I'm likely to just get one from a trusted brand like Anker or Monoprice and be done with it.
• wincy 6y ago
  This is the reason I subscribed to Consumer Reports. I pay $10 a month to have access to unbiased scoring of products. It's $40 a year, they're relying on donations but I'm fine with paying more to help support them.
• curiousgal 6y ago
  Same thing happened to me but they offered me another product of theirs. I ended up posting a 5 star review because the product was actually good. This was almost two years ago and I still use it to this day so I don't feel bad at all.
• CarVac 6y ago
  This is why I don't buy from Amazon at all anymore.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  This is why you should prioritize 4-star reviews if you want an honest positive opinion on the product. For negative reviews, I look at 1-stars, but these are often "arrived broken" etc. types of reviews. Unless that's a large portion, I ignore them. I look at 2-star reviews when I want a good review on the flaws of a product.
  • ggm 6y ago
    > This is why you should prioritize 4-star reviews if you want an honest positive opinion on the product. I think you mean de-prioritize
    • ineedasername 6y ago
      No, I de-prioritize reading 5-star reviews. I rarely more than glance at them. I prioritize reading 4-star reviews, figuring they're much less likely to be paid/fake. I've also heard speculation that for cheap products, competitors will buy it & trash it in the review, not sure if it's true or not though.
      • ggm 6y ago
        so its the range 2-4?
    • shortstuffsushi 6y ago
      I think GP had it stated correctly: if you want honest opinions, look at four star reviews. Five/one star extremes tend to read overly emphatic and aren't as likely to include both positives and negatives, so as a consumer (and perhaps as a platform hoping to show "good" reviews), these more moderate reviews will likely give a more accurate picture of the product, and thus could get priority for display. That said... as soon as you do that, obviously you're going to see four stars getting gamed as well.
      • ggm 6y ago
        as for the above comment, surely this is a normal distribution problem and both sides of the tail have to be looked at? you need to look at 2 and 4, or the range 2-4, not 1-5
• mtnGoat 6y ago
  I got a product recently with a similar card inside, it was shipped prime from an Amazon facility. I know Amazon doesn't look inside things but pretty brazen if you ask me to use their facilities, shipping network and platform to run fraud.
• amatecha 6y ago
  Yeah, I got a similar card in an Amazon-delivered package once. I left no review at all, but it occurred to me that I should clearly have even less trust in Amazon review scores than I already did.
• bambax 6y ago
  I receive at least one email per day to the address displayed on my Amazon profile for products to review, with a promise of full reimbursement via Paypal after proof of 5-star review. It would be extremely easy for Amazon to go after those sellers. The reason they don't do it is because reviews move products. Amazon's business is moving products -- not pleasing customers, or providing the world with honest reviews, or being a force of good, etc. That said, it's probably normal that cperciva's review was denied, as reviews should describe the product and only the product, not the virtue of the seller or the validity of other reviews: > I figured I should leave a product review mentioning this and warning other customers to not trust the 5 reviews of this product* Not the place. Product reviews are not about a specific seller; a product can be sold by many sellers; the fact that one or even many sellers are bad doesn't mean the product itself is bad. (And that's true even if the product is sold only by the manufacturer. In theory it's always possible that other sellers will come along, if only to sell used versions of the same product.)
• ineedasername 6y ago
  There are public forums & facebook groups where tips & vendors are discussed for getting such freebies: It should be trivial for Amazon's fraud team to find the easy ones and ban them, make it a least a little more costly to conduct the scam. Obviously they don't bother because it's really not in their interest.
• ffggvv 6y ago
  when the iphone 12 was released, there was some cases with a lot of reviews even though the phone wasn’t released yet. One was “amazon’s choice”. if you ordered it; they also came with a card for a 10 dollar gift card for a fake review. they said not to post the cards text in the review
• klik99 6y ago
  There’s a very healthy community of people refunding purchases for reviews on WeChat, there’s even people who’s full time job is connecting people looking for free stuff with suppliers, acting as a middleman. It’s not quite as bad as fake reviews as they encourage returning the product if it’s not any good. I do not engage in this personally but I have several friends who have had their accounts locked out from leaving reviews, so I highly doubt that Amazon is letting this happen. I think it’s more likely that Amazon saw his negative review as another supplier trying to take down a listing which is also a problem. The market of Amazon listings is incredibly complex, fascinating and likely beyond any hope without fundamental structural changes.
• elorant 6y ago
  There's a solution around this. Read only the negative reviews, especially the 3-star ones. I've been doing it for years, long before 5-star reviews became a business, and it never let me down.
• dsugarman 6y ago
  For credibility, I am the founder & CEO of Zentail (YC12), we have supported billions of dollars of Amazon GMV and our software helps sellers create winning listings. TLDR: Review programs aren't downright evil, but this one is egregious. Most people here are enraged by fake reviews, I think that's more than fair, but I also encourage everyone to think broader about the issues here. In general, review programs are necessary to prime the pump and Amazon has even rolled out their own version. Reviews are a critical piece of a winning listing on Amazon and without a path to get your product in front of consumers, you have no path to get reviews and only the incumbent products win. That's pretty bad for everyone, especially the consumer, it's not how a free market should operate. What's egregious here (outside of violating Amazon terms) is getting a refund only for a 5 star review. I strongly believe you should be able to give out a free product for a review, but that review should be honest. I understand that the incentives might make someone want to leave a positive review, but with proper guidance and even selection of quality reviewers you can mitigate that. Here's the big truth: at some point an Amazon listing has to live on it's own. At some point, your product will start to sell organically and there will be so many organic reviews, it will sink a listing really fast. The market opportunity to incentivize reviews (or even pay for fake reviews) with a bad product is actually pretty poor, good luck making enough profit to support all those free products you just shipped.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  I wonder if providing additional data would help people understand the review distribution more easily at a glance. Something like a Net Promoter Score, kind of like Steam's binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down, would add a useful additional vector of information. Not remove stars & reviews though, the nuance in 2,3,4 star reviews is still useful.
• harry8 6y ago
  As soon as you start viewing amazon's core competency and competitive advantage as being a tax dodge everything else makes a lot more sense. They're not really much good at anything else but having that massive tax dodge advantage takes the whole industry on a competitive spree toward the gutter. Remember when it became well known what a terrible employer amazon are? So they paid staff to fake twitter post positive things about working at amazon? The only thing that will improve amazon's behavior is if they percieive a threat of losing their tax dodges due to political unpopularity. See now all this looks a lot more to me like vested interest socialism and cronyism than anything resembling capitalism but I'm sure my socialist friends will view it as the opposite. Everyone is holding their nose at the sheer stench of it. Whatever your cause without cleaning up the endemic, pervasive corruption leading to massive regulatory capture, that cause is lost.
  • mattnewton 6y ago
    > See now all this looks a lot more to me like vested interest socialism and cronyism than anything resembling capitalism What is “vested interest socialism?” Do you mean something like an uncompetitive firm propped up by the government?
    • harry8 6y ago
      I draw the distinction between what socialism is meant to be and what socialism usually, in my opinion becomes, which is an unchallengable power base for vested interests. The rules a rigged against you and me because we aren't on the inside, friends with the power, which is usually beurocrats in socialist states. You do something faster, better, cheaper and still fail. Notice this kind of thing is not Bernie Sanders who barely qualifies as anything remotely socialist outside of the USA. Having competition where companies and whole industries go broke and shut down with their assets sold off to those who can use them better has been thought of as a useful counter-measure to this. When there is regulatory capture destroying that competition you get the worst of all worlds. It's not captitalism, it looks more to me like bad socialism. My socialist friends would say it's not remotely socialism it looks more like captialism and this is what always happens in captialism. Just about everyone says it stinks and needs fixing. Bezos doesn't. Murdoch doesn't. They say this is the best that can possibly be because everything else is worse, which is probably true with respect to their power and influence. I don't see it as true in any other dimension. It needs fixing. Someone will ride that desire to fix it to political power. I hope that person turns out to be a decent human being rather than a genuine facist which President Trump was not and is not, whatever else are his many faults.
• stakkur 6y ago
  I published my first book on Amazon in 2012. It's sold roughly 15,000 copies since then. Along the way, I've learned that there are not only multiple ways to easily buy reviews (and in bulk), but that a significant portion of Amazon reviews are these 'bought' reviews--utterly fake. Amazon does police reviews, but it's inconsistent and easily defeated. More practically, I've come to realize that Amazon reviews have very little to do with sales now. Many authors I know feel the same way.
  • bambax 6y ago
    Products with bad reviews sell more than products with no reviews. No reviews is the worst. Amazon used to allow asking for "honest" reviews if it was mentioned in the review that it had been solicited. They changed that policy a year or two ago and as a result the whole review business went underground.
    • stakkur 6y ago
      That's a good point--the exception here is 'no reviews'.
• joaomacp 6y ago
  Another reason to consume less stuff. It's not that often that I buy stuff that really needs to be high quality. But when I do, I make sure to look for honest reviews elsewhere, on multiple websites. Of course Google will try to feed you crappy referral websites, which just write as many low-quality articles as possible, and make money through the Amazon affiliate link to buy the item. It takes some skill to dodge this and find the real stuff.
• low_key 6y ago
  I wrote a thorough description a how a seller was manipulating their reviews and put that into my own review. I got an official warning from Amazon and my review was removed. They said that my account could be closed if I repeated my violations. Amazon reviews used to be great (~10 years ago). You could sort by review score and feel pretty confident that the top items fairly safe. These days Amazon has so many counterfeit items that it's a chore to even browse. The most recent counterfeit items I've received are clothing which were labeled as Adidas and Hanes.
• alphabettsy 6y ago
  Amazon has become a dumping ground for re-labeled products and the reviews are nearly completely untrustworthy because of the gaming and scams.
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  I’ve had tons of these offers. Idk why Amazon doesn’t search their incoming product for this type of stuff. They would find similar cards in most electronic accessories.
• lern_too_spel 6y ago
  Posting that reviews are fake in a review makes Amazon look bad and goes to somebody who can't penalize the merchant. That's why they removed it. Telling Amazon directly that a merchant is paying for fake reviews doesn't make Amazon look bad, could get routed to somebody who can penalize the merchant, and is more likely to get results. I'm not justifying Amazon's actions here — just explaining the reality of the situation.
• atotic 6y ago
  I used to be all-in on Amazon shopping, that's where I started all my shopping searches. Now Amazon is my site of last resort for everything but books. The rest of the net has gotten competitive. I do my research on wirecutter/reddit, and buy it from manufacturer/walmart/bestbuy, other niche trustworthy stores. The cash back I get back from my Amazon card usually covers cost of most of what I still buy from Amazon, so Amazon has become my "free goodies" shop. I think this is great. Having "an everything store" that everyone uses always felt like a monopoly ripe for customer abuse.
  • pdxandi 6y ago
    Just wanted to plug bookshop.org. It benefits local bookstores and my shopping experiences have been positive. There are other great sites out there, too, if you're willing to buy used or can tolerate slower shipping. I get the appeal of amazon.com though because their prices are competitive and the shipping is usually consistently fast. I just like local bookstores.
    • jcrawfordor 6y ago
      bookshop.org is operated by Ingram, which is generally the wholesaler to bookstores but also has a large online order fulfillment business. The upside of this is that Ingram is a logistics specialist and has the ability to ship very quickly and reliably---and so bookshop.org is in a way the best of both worlds, as it pays the local bookstores via their Ingram contract while also leveraging Ingram's order fulfillment business to get things shipped quickly and reliably.
      • pdxandi 6y ago
        That's great information. Thank you for sharing. I wasn't aware it was operated by the wholesaler to local bookstores, but that makes sense. It seems to be a smooth platform with a massive selection.
• bdcravens 6y ago
  I literally just got a postcard offering a $10 reward for a 5 star review for a phone case I paid $9 for.
• system2 6y ago
  Every year I order over $50-100k worth of products for myself and my clients (servers, electronics etc.) Every single 1 star review I've ever left was deleted. I have amazon prime american express card too. It is not like I am not a new customer. Last year alone I have 400 orders alone with 1000+ products. I don't bother leaving reviews. I found nearly all cleaning supplies 1/3 of the price at Home Depot. Dog food also cheaper at PetSmart. To me, amazon is no longer the #1 option and I no longer buy unknown brands from it.
  • panopticon 6y ago
    > I no longer buy unknown brands from it. I'm nearly doing the opposite. I try not to buy known brands from Amazon unless the ability to identify a counterfeit is really easy. This has been especially problematic with clothing, and I just don't buy clothing from them anymore unless it's from a cheap unknown brand where I don't care about the quality/brand.
  • phendrenad2 6y ago
    I only buy unknown brands from Amazon. It's a great discovery platform for low-cost Chinese versions of stuff (such as electronics). Name-brand I exclusively buy in stores
• gnicholas 6y ago
  Another apparent Amazon scam, via @kane: https://twitter.com/kane/status/1325940370841038848?s=21 https://twitter.com/kane/status/1325940370841038848?s=21
• alexbrower 6y ago
  There is an insidious and perhaps even more blatant pay-for-review industry in B2B software: Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, etc. They all promise "unbiased reviews" but aggressively offer a company's "confirmed users" a variety of small fiduciary benefits to leave a review (gift card here and there). Then, they upsell the B2B vendor on the ability to manipulate those reviews; e.g., you pay an extra fee to triage negative reviews by telling customer support "nope, not a confirmed user - please remove." For whatever reason (probably sheer traffic), these B2B review sites have high domain authority scores. So even where marketing teams agree that paying for reviews is BS — there can arise an incentive to pay for reviews from an SEO perspective. Realizing that this idea is fraught with challenges for B2B customers and vendors: is there an open source protocol that could anonymously verify that a user is _actually_ a current or former user of a given service? Chickens and eggs...
• wannabag 6y ago
  Let's face it, Amazon's review system is broken at the core. I have the perspective of a seller on Amazon and, as such, you simply don't exist without _positive_ reviews. For the story, it all begins when you start with Amazon as a channel. Ads would be an option to kick start a presence but you actually need some traffic (you actually need the "buy box" which is just Amazon's way to legitimate you as a seller) to be able to advertise (this is true at the very start on a given Amazon market). So you, or people you know, place _fake_ orders to get started and if possible add a first review which, naturally, is fake. Once you have that going, congrats, you are selling on Amazon. From there on it's a uphill battle to gain traction and it all comes down to better position for your products. This is not different from any market really but there are specific hurdles along the way. Amazon tracks the number of "defects" on your product which counts things like A-to-Z claims or... negative reviews (and more stuff I won't bother you with here). If you hit a threshold (1% of claims _or_ negative reviews) you start seeing a nice warning telling you that your account is at risk of deactivation. Additionally, a similar threshold or trend, unsure tbh, will result in a temporary loss of the buy box mentioned earlier (60 day look back window for the above-mentioned threshold). This means that you disappear! (no ads, remember?). So, you can probably imagine how strong your incentives are to get any positive review juice out there. What is shown in the tweet is actually against Amazon's terms[1] but there are more (and less) subtle ways to get what you need including things mentioned in comments around here and you really don't have that much of a choice if you want to stand out in the noise. With all that being said, whatever you think of delivery related reviews for instance (especially in covid times which has added a lot of uncertainty to the whole thing), they hurt businesses exactly where it hurts. And that can be extended to negative reviews in general even when these are legitimate warnings for other potential buyers. Imagine now for a second that you rely on low volumes of orders, the number of potential genuine reviews is also low and with the Amazon thresholds you are therefore literally at the mercy of a few bad reviews without a cushion of positive reviews to fall on. So yeah there is a market for fake reviews, duh... [1] not the best link but there is a screenshot showing the terms in the thread where it says that you can't ask for positive reviews or give something in exchange for it.. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/new-asking-for-reviews-by-email-is-prohibited/444172 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/new-asking-for-rev...
• HarryHirsch 6y ago
  look at this from a slightly different angle: Amazon is entrenched infrastructure for a great part of internet sales, and the only way to get ahead is via soliciting reviews for money. If this were true this would support claims of a monopoly position in the market, unfortunately antitrust laws as written today are unsuitable to address the problem adequately.
• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  As someone who both blogs and does freelance writing through a service, I have written articles describing Amazon products. I don't think I have ever written a "fake review." I think what I've done has fallen on the ethical side of that line, but I know there are writers who will write fake reviews because it pays and writing is a hard way to make a living. If you object to this kind of thing going on, let me again remind people that there are creatives -- like me -- trying to fund their work with tips, Patreon and similar and not making enough money. Over the years when I have complained that I don't make enough money even though my articles have a track record of hitting the front page of HN, I have repeatedly been told "Get a real job, you whiner. Quit expecting writing to pay. It doesn't pay." Sure it does. But most of what pays is stuff that routinely hits the front page of HN as "undesirable" in some fashion: Fake reviews, sketchy content marketing where the piece is intended to sell you something rather than actually inform you, etc. If that's not the internet you want, let me suggest you make an effort to support independent creatives. I'm too poor to give money via Patreon to other creatives, but I run r/ClothingStartups so indie clothing brands have a venue for advertising their stuff for free and trying to connect with others and figure out how to develop their business. So I do what I can to help small-time operators succeed online because the years I spent homeless while being told to STFU about my whiny crap of not having enough income while tens of thousands of people read my writing drilled it into me that "This is one of the things wrong with the world and this is something we desperately need to work on in earnest."
• gtsop 6y ago
  That's why i pretty much ignore every review that doesn't provide solid criticism of the product. I look for 2-4 stars trying to avoid super negative as well as super positive reviews
• ratsmack 6y ago
  It is my position that Amazon reviews are pointless. All I want to know is the number sold and the number of issues or returns and the reason.
• yenwodyah 6y ago
  Hey, I got one of those too. Tried to report it, but Amazon won't even accept reports about sellers buying reviews. And then the product vanished from the store after a week or so.
• hellotomyrars 6y ago
  I recently somehow ended up on a mailing list exchanging free products for reviews. Decided I was curious and followed up. The process was incredibly effortless and quick. I haven't received the product yet (which I will review but I'm not going to lie about it if it sucks). They sent me slightly more than the cost of the item via paypal 30 minutes after I placed my order. I was surprised how quick and easy it was. No wonder it's working. I've also gotten plenty of those cards or similar offers from stuff I've ordered on Amazon in the last six months. Never followed up on those.
• chairmanwow1 6y ago
  A process like this is pretty much table stakes for anyone selling on Amazon. You can’t post a new product and just expect it to organically get sales. You have to have a program to get those initial reviews and hint: they better be good ones. Furthermore, you get penalized into oblivion if you get some bad reviews. So you are required to fix these problems with the customer directly. Either you are sending a free one, refunding, or something. So the example in this post is extreme, but its absolutely not ridiculous given what I’ve seen from other sellers. Seems reasonable that they would take it to this logical conclusion. Instead of indirectly paying for a good review, directly pay for it.
• RachelF 6y ago
  EBay does the same thing. Leave a 1 star review for a fake product and it gets taken down, due to "unspecified reasons".
• jedberg 6y ago
  Amazon will never fix this problem unless mandated by the government to do so. Shifting the liability to Amazon for fake reviews would probably solve this problem.
• astrea 6y ago
  This triggers my recent pet-peeve: why is everyone using Twitter as their de-facto customer service? I know the answer to my question, but it's frustrating and pathetic.
  • TrackerFF 6y ago
    (preface: I rarely use twitter) I guess it's because: 1. It's super simple to set up, and the short length forces you to be direct. 2. It's incredibly easy for sharing - so there's potential for things to go viral, fast. Good for customers, bad for companies. Hashtags are quite powerful, as anyone can use them - so if someone decides to block you or whatever, you can still reach through hashtags. Likewise, I guess a lot of big companies are actively monitoring twitter for things related to them. Pretty easy to automate.
• nicolas_t 6y ago
  I had this happen to me recently, there was a scratch card in the box and upon scratching it, I was told that I won $20 and to contact them. Then, when contacting them, they told me they'd send me the money but to please write a review on amazon. The thing is, I'd have written a 5 star review for that product otherwise since it is very good, but that feels a bit too iffy.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• nhumrich 6y ago
  Any website that has a ranking based on reviews or even votes has a fraud problem. This is Goodharts law in action. Glassdoor, Amazon, Yelp, Google, you name it. This is the "game". Heck, I am sure there are even some people who game HN votes.
• URSpider94 6y ago
  A possible explanation: it would be simple enough for someone to slag their competitors by leaving reviews saying “this person tried to bribe me with a gift card to leave a fake review.” For every person trying to buy their way to the top, there is someone else trying to knock down their competitors by falsely implicating them in rules violations ... I would imagine it would be better to report this interaction to Amazon customer service, including forwarding a copy of the email, rather than addressing this through a product review.
• ma5ter 6y ago
  Sellers offering 6~12 months extended warranty in exchange for a 5-star review is quite common on Amazon India!!
• re6tor 6y ago
  Yup, I have to admit I do this myself. A good amount of things in my household have been acquired like this. I'm on a few WeChat groups where the reps of different manufacturing firms constantly upload pictures of the newest products they sell on Amazon. For a 5 star review, I'll get a full refund either via Paypal or WeChat Pay.
• breakingwalls 6y ago
  This happened to me on Google Maps. I hired packers and movers and once everything was done, they asked me to post a Google Maps & Yelp review to get $50 off. Platform abuse is there everywhere, but do they go unnoticed is the question.