If the reviews on that last absolutely necessary and not superfluous thing you buy on Amazon look like too much copypasta, there’s a good reason: fake reviews abound and people are being ripped off. pay to post them.
On Monday, Amazon filed a lawsuit against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that distribute cash or merchandise to buyers willing to post bogus product reviews. Global teams have served to recruit fake reviewers and operate in Amazon’s online stores in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Italy.
If 10,000 Facebook groups sounds like a lot, that’s clearly the total number of groups that Amazon has reported to Facebook since 2020. The company noted that previous legal action it took was effective and “closed many great rated brokers”, but here we are. They’ve been suing people for this ever since all the way back to 2015.
The company named a group “Amazon Product Reviews,” which had more than 40,000 members until Facebook removed it earlier in 2022. That group evaded detection through its age-old AI evasion strategy is Swapping a few letters around into phrases will make it destructible.
Amazon says that it will leverage the discovery process to “identify bad actors and remove fake reviews authorized by these fraudsters that have not been detected by advanced Amazon technology, regulators, and the like.” professional inspection and constant supervision.”
Surveillance can be ongoing, but it’s clear that thousands upon thousands of illegal reviews push products through the online retailer’s massive digital store every day, around the world. And Regulators are taking note – something that is sure to light a small fire under everyone’s favorite online shopping block.
Amazon has struggled with product ratings artificially for years. One Washington Post An investigation in 2018 clearly showed that fake reviews dominated several product categories, including bluetooth headsets and supplements.
At the time, the Post noticed a thriving cottage industry that was selling fake Facebook reviews. Sellers urged Amazon shoppers on Facebook on “dozens of networks, including Amazon Review Club and Amazon Reviewers Group, to give brilliant feedback in exchange for money or other compensation,” according to the Post.
Amazon acknowledged the scope of the problem in one blog post last year. “Due to our continued improvements in detecting fake reviews and the connection between bad guys buying and selling accounts, we have noticed a growing trend of bad guys trying to collect money. soliciting fake reviews outside of Amazon, especially through social media services,” the company wrote.
Amazon said it reported more than 1,000 review sales teams on its social media platforms in the first quarter of 2021 – a threefold increase from the same period a year earlier. It’s not clear if that speaks to the prevalence of fake reviews or that the online retailer is taking the matter more seriously, but the company wants to shift the blame to social media companies because they’ve lax enforcement. loose those groups when they violate ground rules.
In the end, fake reviews are not the worst kind of misleading content that internet companies are failing to get rid of. But they to be another example of how, when you have a print cash (or Burn money) internet machine, system problems can get out of control while you are going down causing the line to go up. And sometimes those problems encourage all sorts of bad or weird things. In this case: a small industry of people making money off of making bad products that look good – and once it all worked out, it was hard to untangle what the big money machine did. create.
