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Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach

143 points by localhost 5y ago

localhost 5y ago
Looks like Amazon is also delisting products from a number of prominent sellers as well: https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1391264359599407107 https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1391264359599407107
- harles 5y ago
  I’m glad these companies aren’t just getting a slap on the wrist. I wonder how effective it will be though - surely they can just spring up under a new name very quickly.
bbarnett 5y ago
I've alerted amazon to this via email, chat, and even phone. They barely even take note, or act like they care. I've written reviews disclosing this, Amazon denies publishing them, or they are removed after. I cannot belive they care, not when they could open packaging and verify customer claims. I even sent back an item, with the bribe/review scam which was inside the box, taped to the outside of the box. Amazon does not care. It would reduce profit to care, and their actions show they do not care. Always watch what people do, not what they say. Amazon's actions are clear here.
- lwhi 5y ago
  Amazon's main incentive is profit, I suppose it's difficult to convince them to take something seriously that will potentially affect its bottom line.
  - Google234 5y ago
    AmaZons profit partially comes from having a good reputation. If everyone comes to understand that their reviews are all fake then people won’t use the site as much. E.g. you might use a trusted blog as a review and they might link to some other site. So they should care.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      Or they will just assume that all reviews are fake on all sites, and still buy at Amazon because of their Prime membership. I don't know that Amazon has a good reputation.
    - lwhi 5y ago
      Amazon has a terrible reputation. They make profit despite this, largely because they have no quibble guarantees and free, fast delivery for prime members.
    - stordoff 5y ago
      I've just started completely ignoring reviews on Amazon. I can send stuff back if it's not up to quality (UK - I realise the this may not apply globally), so it's not worth my time trying to determine what reviews are/aren't real. Amazon still ends up getting my custom as many other sites have more awkward returns processes or are not competitive on price.
      - lwhi 5y ago
        Exactly, I agree.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  I agree. I used to do a lot of shopping on amazon. I cancelled prime and don't look there at all now. It seems for a long time they knowingly helped sellers defraud consumers with fake reviews, allowed pay/free product for reviews, hid the reviews pointing it out, and basically all around helped these companies lie to amazon customers. now they're responding but its been years and years of this.
Closi 5y ago
Give it a week and they will all be back. Amazon will delist and then reinstate as a form of off-contract punishment in my experience. I once worked for a company that got delisted for a week because they did something Amazon didn't like (Over chat a support agent suggested the customer got a replacement part from a plumbing parts company rather than amazon.com because they didn't stock it, and they got delisted for suggesting a customer goes to a store that wasn't Amazon. This is where we learnt that Amazon is automatically scanning support requests for the mention of other stores and will issue automatic bans if you mention them!). It was a small company (<$5m sales revenue) but was still tens of thousands of pounds of revenue!
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Gosh, seems like that might have a chilling effect
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >Amazon is automatically scanning support requests for the mention of other stores and will issue automatic bans if you mention them! gee, no anti-competitive practices there.
- tyingq 5y ago
  It seems like Amazon doesn't have any teeth for some countries. For US sellers, for example, an EIN is a fairly good deterrent as it's cost prohibitive to create a bunch of them for small scale selling. It seems like whatever the equivalent of an EIN is for some countries must be cheap to recycle.
intricatedetail 5y ago
We need a regulator to crack down on Amazon. There are so many products with fake certificates, unsafe or straight up scams. If you report those nothing happens.
- failwhaleshark 5y ago
  Computer killing powered USB hub. (Mac murderer) https://youtu.be/Uh6iKilgtG0 https://youtu.be/Uh6iKilgtG0 Horrific USB power supply fault. (Electrocution risk.) https://youtu.be/3Hdn0MuCK_0 https://youtu.be/3Hdn0MuCK_0
vasergen 5y ago
Off topic, but do you have any idea how to make reviews more relieble on websites? Is there a way to make it impossible/very hard in the first place? It is not problem only on amazon but pretty much on any big platform where bying comments gives you an advantage
- anotha1 5y ago
  Blockchain \s
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  I don’t think there is a technological solution to this. It is not even the real problem, it is just a simptom. The root cause is that people still have to compete for their livelihood, and cheating is always a viable way for some. Our thinking and the world will have to evolve past the current state of scarcity. Then nobody will be incentivized to waste their intellect on covertly conning people for financial gain.
  - tbihl 5y ago
    Scarcity is a necessary outcome of hedonic adaptation in a finite world, and thus an immutable fact of human existence. Given that, culture is really the solution to problems of cheating. Which, of course, is not a technical solution either.
- Retr0spectrum 5y ago
  It's an impossible problem to solve completely. The most trusted of reviewers can still be bought out, for a price. I think the best way to improve things is via increased transparency - If I can read a reviewer's past reviews, I can make a better-informed judgement of their reviewing integrity.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  ReviewMeta is a Chrome extension that does a good job
- jordan801 5y ago
Google234 5y ago
Why doesn’t Amazon care about the notes that all these sellers are throwing in their products offering money for a positive review?
- sm4rk0 5y ago
  better reviews => more sales => more profit
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Do they? If a product has bad reviews, the person will buy an alternative... but likely also on Amazon.
- kps 5y ago
  Amazon removes reviews that call this out, so they do care — just in the other direction.
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    I just had an argument about this with Amazon support. They took down a review for an item where I mentioned that the manufacturer included a card in the item's box offering to pay you for reviews. Apparently my review violated their "advertising" policy
    - fibonachos 5y ago
      I had a similar experience recently because I called out that the name brand webcam was not in retail packaging. That was the last electronics purchase I’ll likely ever make from Amazon. I ended up returning it and actually found one at Best Buy a few days later.
      - russh 5y ago
        My favorite rejected review was for 6 slate coasters that arrived as slate chips because they were shipped in a large envelope with no padding.
einpoklum 5y ago
The fact that products' fate depends on the (manipulation of) some user reviews on a single site, albeit a very large one, is problematic. Also - I wonder if Amazon is not well aware of such practices.
- dexterdog 5y ago
  You wonder? There is nothing to wonder about. There is zero chance that Amazon doesn't know about every bit of it.
bhouston 5y ago
Is there a list of the largest and worst offenders? I would like to avoid their products going forward.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wackget 5y ago
  Honestly it's largely Chinese brands selling all sorts of crap. Any time you see a ridiculous-looking off-brand name, it's very likely they're using fake reviews to boost their position in the rankings. Often they will bulk-sell a cheap product, rake in good reviews, then re-write the entire product page to a different more expensive product but retaining all of the good reviews.
  - failwhaleshark 5y ago
    Require every product to be genuinely UL or ETL listed with traceable certificates in order to be sold in a certain country, or ban them from importation. And then test them; if they fail, revoke certificates until resolved.
refactor_master 5y ago
5-star reviews are almost useless (“It does what it says on the tin”). I’d rather go by in-depth reviews elsewhere, or negative reviews.
- jandrese 5y ago
  The best reviews to read are the 1 or 2 star reviews. If the reviews are of the “I bought this RS232 adapter and it won’t plug into my graphics card!!! Total junk!!!!!” and “delivery guy didn’t ring the doorbell when he dropped it off!” and there is a good number of reviews then the product is usually good. However when the problems with the product are spelled out in detail with attached pictures showing the defect I have to reconsider.
- m463 5y ago
  The ones that get me are "I've had this for 15 minutes, and it is WONDERFUL! 5-stars!" It is nice when people come back when something goes wrong and ding the reviews. I wish there was a way to give feedback on reviews though - like most reviews that talk about delivery/seller instead of the product.
brtkdotse 5y ago
I have fond memories of buying hard-to-find books and CDs on Amazon back in the early aughts. It felt well-curated and trustworthy. I stopped using Amazon some 5-6 years ago and when I returned recently it felt like a mix of a dollar store and credit card phishing site. Hard pass.
- iscrewyou 5y ago
  Yeah, the product art on the pages is nothing short of dollar store art.
shawnz 5y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27075245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27075245
yamellasmallela 5y ago
I hardly buy anything from Amazon anymore except for things I know are chinese garbage or small things like toothpaste. I don't trust that namebrand items are authentic at all and you shouldn't either.
- DamnYuppie 5y ago
  Same. I still will buy books on occasion but even that is maybe only half of the time and will pay a bit more to go to Barnes and Knoble.
smbv 5y ago
Link without tracking params: https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/amazon-reviews-leak-report/ https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/amazon-reviews-leak-re...
- artificial 5y ago
  And here's an archived link sans any tracking: https://archive.is/ZfCI3 https://archive.is/ZfCI3
rkagerer 5y ago
So they were running the fake review operation on Amazon's own infrastructure? There's a certain irony there.
wackget 5y ago
It's ridiculously easy to spot fake reviews. The clearest giveaway is lots of customer photographs of the item. Multiple photos of the item and/or its packaging from different angles, adding absolutely no value to the review, is virtually guaranteed to mean a fake review. Seriously - who takes 10 photos of their new USB cable and the box it came in? Some companies are requesting fake video reviews now too. Secondly, fake reviews are required to have minimum word counts. So a 100 word review about a USB cable is also likely to be fake. Finally, they're required to be at least 4 stars; usually 5. Anything below 4 and they won't pay out.
- Riseed 5y ago
  > Finally, they're required to be at least 4 stars; usually 5. Anything below 4 and they won't pay out. Unless, of course, it's a 1-star review for a competitor's product.
bobbob1921 5y ago
I agree with others there is no technical solution to a cultural problem like this. However Amazons intentions are made clear by this fact: The ability to search or properly filter/visualize the reviews for xyz product has been extremely limited until recently. (And I would argue it still is very limited, intentionally by Amazon). In other words on Amazon‘s website and their apps the interface for filtering/searching within reviews for a given product is horrible and very limited. Does anyone doubt Amazon has the ability and/or resources to improve the review GUI/interface? Why do they refuse to? (Rhetorical)

143 points by localhost 5y ago

Looks like Amazon is also delisting products from a number of prominent sellers as well: https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1391264359599407107 https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1391264359599407107

harles 5y ago
I’m glad these companies aren’t just getting a slap on the wrist. I wonder how effective it will be though - surely they can just spring up under a new name very quickly.

bbarnett 5y ago

I've alerted amazon to this via email, chat, and even phone. They barely even take note, or act like they care. I've written reviews disclosing this, Amazon denies publishing them, or they are removed after. I cannot belive they care, not when they could open packaging and verify customer claims. I even sent back an item, with the bribe/review scam which was inside the box, taped to the outside of the box. Amazon does not care. It would reduce profit to care, and their actions show they do not care. Always watch what people do, not what they say. Amazon's actions are clear here.

lwhi 5y ago
Amazon's main incentive is profit, I suppose it's difficult to convince them to take something seriously that will potentially affect its bottom line.
- Google234 5y ago
  AmaZons profit partially comes from having a good reputation. If everyone comes to understand that their reviews are all fake then people won’t use the site as much. E.g. you might use a trusted blog as a review and they might link to some other site. So they should care.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Or they will just assume that all reviews are fake on all sites, and still buy at Amazon because of their Prime membership. I don't know that Amazon has a good reputation.
  - lwhi 5y ago
    Amazon has a terrible reputation. They make profit despite this, largely because they have no quibble guarantees and free, fast delivery for prime members.
  - stordoff 5y ago
    I've just started completely ignoring reviews on Amazon. I can send stuff back if it's not up to quality (UK - I realise the this may not apply globally), so it's not worth my time trying to determine what reviews are/aren't real. Amazon still ends up getting my custom as many other sites have more awkward returns processes or are not competitive on price.
    - lwhi 5y ago
      Exactly, I agree.
LegitShady 5y ago
I agree. I used to do a lot of shopping on amazon. I cancelled prime and don't look there at all now. It seems for a long time they knowingly helped sellers defraud consumers with fake reviews, allowed pay/free product for reviews, hid the reviews pointing it out, and basically all around helped these companies lie to amazon customers. now they're responding but its been years and years of this.

Closi 5y ago

Give it a week and they will all be back. Amazon will delist and then reinstate as a form of off-contract punishment in my experience. I once worked for a company that got delisted for a week because they did something Amazon didn't like (Over chat a support agent suggested the customer got a replacement part from a plumbing parts company rather than amazon.com because they didn't stock it, and they got delisted for suggesting a customer goes to a store that wasn't Amazon. This is where we learnt that Amazon is automatically scanning support requests for the mention of other stores and will issue automatic bans if you mention them!). It was a small company (<$5m sales revenue) but was still tens of thousands of pounds of revenue!

Applejinx 5y ago
Gosh, seems like that might have a chilling effect
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>Amazon is automatically scanning support requests for the mention of other stores and will issue automatic bans if you mention them! gee, no anti-competitive practices there.
tyingq 5y ago
It seems like Amazon doesn't have any teeth for some countries. For US sellers, for example, an EIN is a fairly good deterrent as it's cost prohibitive to create a bunch of them for small scale selling. It seems like whatever the equivalent of an EIN is for some countries must be cheap to recycle.

intricatedetail 5y ago

We need a regulator to crack down on Amazon. There are so many products with fake certificates, unsafe or straight up scams. If you report those nothing happens.

failwhaleshark 5y ago
Computer killing powered USB hub. (Mac murderer) https://youtu.be/Uh6iKilgtG0 https://youtu.be/Uh6iKilgtG0 Horrific USB power supply fault. (Electrocution risk.) https://youtu.be/3Hdn0MuCK_0 https://youtu.be/3Hdn0MuCK_0

vasergen 5y ago

Off topic, but do you have any idea how to make reviews more relieble on websites? Is there a way to make it impossible/very hard in the first place? It is not problem only on amazon but pretty much on any big platform where bying comments gives you an advantage

anotha1 5y ago
Blockchain \s
faeyanpiraat 5y ago
I don’t think there is a technological solution to this. It is not even the real problem, it is just a simptom. The root cause is that people still have to compete for their livelihood, and cheating is always a viable way for some. Our thinking and the world will have to evolve past the current state of scarcity. Then nobody will be incentivized to waste their intellect on covertly conning people for financial gain.
- tbihl 5y ago
  Scarcity is a necessary outcome of hedonic adaptation in a finite world, and thus an immutable fact of human existence. Given that, culture is really the solution to problems of cheating. Which, of course, is not a technical solution either.
Retr0spectrum 5y ago
It's an impossible problem to solve completely. The most trusted of reviewers can still be bought out, for a price. I think the best way to improve things is via increased transparency - If I can read a reviewer's past reviews, I can make a better-informed judgement of their reviewing integrity.
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
ReviewMeta is a Chrome extension that does a good job
jordan801 5y ago

Google234 5y ago

Why doesn’t Amazon care about the notes that all these sellers are throwing in their products offering money for a positive review?

sm4rk0 5y ago
better reviews => more sales => more profit
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Do they? If a product has bad reviews, the person will buy an alternative... but likely also on Amazon.
kps 5y ago
Amazon removes reviews that call this out, so they do care — just in the other direction.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  I just had an argument about this with Amazon support. They took down a review for an item where I mentioned that the manufacturer included a card in the item's box offering to pay you for reviews. Apparently my review violated their "advertising" policy
  - fibonachos 5y ago
    I had a similar experience recently because I called out that the name brand webcam was not in retail packaging. That was the last electronics purchase I’ll likely ever make from Amazon. I ended up returning it and actually found one at Best Buy a few days later.
    - russh 5y ago
      My favorite rejected review was for 6 slate coasters that arrived as slate chips because they were shipped in a large envelope with no padding.

einpoklum 5y ago

The fact that products' fate depends on the (manipulation of) some user reviews on a single site, albeit a very large one, is problematic. Also - I wonder if Amazon is not well aware of such practices.

dexterdog 5y ago
You wonder? There is nothing to wonder about. There is zero chance that Amazon doesn't know about every bit of it.

bhouston 5y ago

Is there a list of the largest and worst offenders? I would like to avoid their products going forward.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wackget 5y ago
Honestly it's largely Chinese brands selling all sorts of crap. Any time you see a ridiculous-looking off-brand name, it's very likely they're using fake reviews to boost their position in the rankings. Often they will bulk-sell a cheap product, rake in good reviews, then re-write the entire product page to a different more expensive product but retaining all of the good reviews.
- failwhaleshark 5y ago
  Require every product to be genuinely UL or ETL listed with traceable certificates in order to be sold in a certain country, or ban them from importation. And then test them; if they fail, revoke certificates until resolved.

refactor_master 5y ago

5-star reviews are almost useless (“It does what it says on the tin”). I’d rather go by in-depth reviews elsewhere, or negative reviews.

jandrese 5y ago
The best reviews to read are the 1 or 2 star reviews. If the reviews are of the “I bought this RS232 adapter and it won’t plug into my graphics card!!! Total junk!!!!!” and “delivery guy didn’t ring the doorbell when he dropped it off!” and there is a good number of reviews then the product is usually good. However when the problems with the product are spelled out in detail with attached pictures showing the defect I have to reconsider.
m463 5y ago
The ones that get me are "I've had this for 15 minutes, and it is WONDERFUL! 5-stars!" It is nice when people come back when something goes wrong and ding the reviews. I wish there was a way to give feedback on reviews though - like most reviews that talk about delivery/seller instead of the product.

brtkdotse 5y ago

I have fond memories of buying hard-to-find books and CDs on Amazon back in the early aughts. It felt well-curated and trustworthy. I stopped using Amazon some 5-6 years ago and when I returned recently it felt like a mix of a dollar store and credit card phishing site. Hard pass.

iscrewyou 5y ago
Yeah, the product art on the pages is nothing short of dollar store art.

shawnz 5y ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27075245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27075245

yamellasmallela 5y ago

I hardly buy anything from Amazon anymore except for things I know are chinese garbage or small things like toothpaste. I don't trust that namebrand items are authentic at all and you shouldn't either.

DamnYuppie 5y ago
Same. I still will buy books on occasion but even that is maybe only half of the time and will pay a bit more to go to Barnes and Knoble.

smbv 5y ago

Link without tracking params: https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/amazon-reviews-leak-report/ https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/amazon-reviews-leak-re...

artificial 5y ago
And here's an archived link sans any tracking: https://archive.is/ZfCI3 https://archive.is/ZfCI3

rkagerer 5y ago

So they were running the fake review operation on Amazon's own infrastructure? There's a certain irony there.

wackget 5y ago

It's ridiculously easy to spot fake reviews. The clearest giveaway is lots of customer photographs of the item. Multiple photos of the item and/or its packaging from different angles, adding absolutely no value to the review, is virtually guaranteed to mean a fake review. Seriously - who takes 10 photos of their new USB cable and the box it came in? Some companies are requesting fake video reviews now too. Secondly, fake reviews are required to have minimum word counts. So a 100 word review about a USB cable is also likely to be fake. Finally, they're required to be at least 4 stars; usually 5. Anything below 4 and they won't pay out.

Riseed 5y ago
> Finally, they're required to be at least 4 stars; usually 5. Anything below 4 and they won't pay out. Unless, of course, it's a 1-star review for a competitor's product.

bobbob1921 5y ago

I agree with others there is no technical solution to a cultural problem like this. However Amazons intentions are made clear by this fact: The ability to search or properly filter/visualize the reviews for xyz product has been extremely limited until recently. (And I would argue it still is very limited, intentionally by Amazon). In other words on Amazon‘s website and their apps the interface for filtering/searching within reviews for a given product is horrible and very limited. Does anyone doubt Amazon has the ability and/or resources to improve the review GUI/interface? Why do they refuse to? (Rhetorical)