Amazon has filed legal action against the admins of over 10,000 Facebook groups that create fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for freebies or money. These groups recruit individuals willing to post fake reviews on Amazon’s stores in the U.S., the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.
Amazon will use information discovered in this legal action to identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters that haven’t already been detected.
Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media, Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.
– Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services
The fraudsters behind similar Facebook groups create fake reviews for hundreds of products available for sale on Amazon’s marketplace. One of the groups identified in the lawsuit is “Amazon Product Review,” which had more than 43,000 members until Meta took down the group earlier this year. Amazon’s investigations revealed that the group’s administrators attempted to hide their activity and evade Facebook’s detection, in part by obfuscating letters from problematic phrases.
This is the latest step by Amazon aimed at stopping fraudsters who attempt to post fake reviews in Amazon’s stores. In the past year, legal action from Amazon has shut down multiple major review brokers targeting customers.
However, selling fake reviews remains an industry-wide problem, and civil litigation is only one step. Permanently ridding fake reviews across retail, travel, and other sectors will require greater public-private partnership, including collaboration between the affected companies, social media sites, and law enforcement, all focused on a goal of greater consumer protection.
3 Responses
Amazon, how about sorting the amount of theft you seem to condone on us poor sellers and penalise us for it first? How about getting some real humans to work for you in your so called customer service instead of automated robots?
Nevermind fake reviews what about fake products being sold by 3rd party sellers, many times being default in the buy box or even Amazons choice. I am sure there are many good sellers on Amazon but on the rare occasion I do use Amazon I make sure I am buying FROM Amazon itself (sold by and dispatched by). I recommended this to some elderly relatives who had recently been scammed buying from 3rd party sellers. The rub is, because it is not very clear to them who they were buying from they thought everything came direct from Amazon!