Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon vice president, worldwide selling partner services, in a blog post stated the entire Amazon organization, including its third-party sellers, have to rally against fake reviews and facilitators of such reviews.
“Customer reviews on Amazon are a core part of why customers love shopping in our stores,” he noted. “Ever since Amazon introduced customer reviews in 1995, we have continued to innovate upon review features that help shoppers easily see and share positive and negative customer feedback that is relevant, helpful and trustworthy. Last year, 125 million customers contributed nearly 1.5 billion reviews and ratings to our stores, providing future Amazon shoppers with transparent insights into the products they were considering.”
He said Amazon has a goal of ensuring that every review appearing in Amazon’s stores is trustworthy and reflects actual customer experiences whether positive or negative. And the company’s rules prohibit fake reviews that intentionally mislead customers by providing information that is not impartial, authentic or intended for a given product or service.
“We invest significant resources to proactively stop fake reviews,” Mehta asserted. “This includes machine learning models that analyze thousands of data points to detect risk, including relations to other accounts, sign-in activity, review history and other indications of unusual behavior.”
He said the company uses “expert investigators” who use “sophisticated fraud-detection tools to analyze and prevent fake reviews from ever appearing in our store. As a result of continued investments, Amazon proactively blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews from our stores in 2022. We will continue to build sophisticated tools that protect customers, our selling partners, and our store from bad actors that attempt to profit by proliferating fake reviews globally.”
Recently, illicit brokers have driven the publishing of most fake reviews. Amazon has targeted such bad actors, but Mehta maintained that increasingly effective countermeasures have been met with new tactics developed by fake review brokers to evade detection.
“These brokers approach consumers directly through websites, social media channels and encrypted messaging services, soliciting them to write fake reviews in exchange for money, free products, or other incentives,” he stated. “They at times portray themselves as legitimate businesses, with networks of hundreds of employees stationed worldwide to support their fraudulent schemes. As this misconduct is often orchestrated outside of Amazon’s store, it can be more challenging to detect, prevent and enforce these bad actors if we are acting alone.”
It’s not that Amazon plans to give up.
“We will continue to take legal action to permanently shut down the fraudsters responsible for facilitating such reviews,” Mehta pointed out. “Last year, Amazon took legal action against over 90 bad actors around the world who facilitated fake reviews, and we sued more than 10,000 Facebook group administrators that attempted to put fake reviews in our stores in exchange for money or free products. As of the end of May 2023, we have already surpassed that number, taking legal action against 94 bad actors, including fraudsters in the U.S., China, and Europe. In June, we added Nice Discount, Nice Rebate, and 100 Rabatt, which operate across the U.S., the U.K., and Germany, respectively. Within Europe, we are also working with leading consumer protection organizations to identify and sue the worst offenders. Our legal actions globally are starting to drive results as we have shut down some of the largest global brokers, including Matronex and Climbazon. By taking such action, Amazon targets the source of the problem.”
Still, high-volume fake review brokers are a global menace, affecting customer reviews across multiple industry sectors. As such, the private sector, consumer groups and governments need to work in tandem to stop fake review brokers and send a clear message that such illicit activity must stop.
According to Mehta, Amazon has learned as it has gone after such fake review brokers and will apply the following protocols in an effort to thwart them:
- Greater information sharing. Amazon wants to share information about known bad actors with consumer groups and industry partners around the world. With cross-industry sharing, including information on broker targeting, tactics and techniques, Amazon and those who would partner with it could more effectively shut down fake review schemes and protect more consumers across industries.
- Clearer enforcement authority and greater funding. Government bodies need to step in and work with businesses by taking appropriate enforcement action. The particulars of the actions may differ from country to country. In some cases, making progress on fake review curtailment may require governments to establish enforcement authority and tools to penalize brokers. In countries that already have legislation or regulations against soliciting fake reviews in place, regulators should invest more heavily in using their authority to take action. Greater funding can help law enforcement build technical expertise needed to investigate and take down fake review brokers.
- Effective controls applied to services that facilitate fake review solicitation. Fake review brokers use third-party services including social media and encrypted third-party messaging services to recruit and operate. Amazon investigates and regularly reports groups involved in broker schemes. In 2022, Amazon reported more than 23,000 social media groups, with over 46 million members and followers, that facilitated the placement of fake reviews on social media sites. Amazon’s efforts regarding third-party services have resulted in better and faster responses to takedown requests from some service providers. But all sites that could be used to facilitate this illicit activity should have robust notice and takedown processes that are effective and quick. Amazon is approaching other companies to help them improve their detection methods and shut down bad actors as well as to educate consumers about fake review solicitation and to ensure robust enforcement policies aimed at fake review brokers developed.
“We are committed to ensuring our reviews remain a trustworthy, insightful resource for customers,” Mehta indicated. “Amazon will continue to protect our stores from fake reviews by investing in proactive tools to detect and stop fake reviews from impacting a customer’s buying decision. We will also continue taking legal action against fake review brokers. However, we cannot win this fight alone. Only through partnerships with like-minded stakeholders across the private and public sector can we truly stop fake review brokers, address the problem at the source and help ensure that reviews are trustworthy across the industry.”
