There is a good reason that the reviews of the last completely necessary and not at all superfluous thing you bought on Amazon looked like so much copypasta.
Amazon sued the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that coordinate cash or goods for buyers willing to post fake product reviews. The fake reviewers were recruited in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy.
Since 2020, Amazon has reported the total number of groups it has reported to Facebook. The company notes that it has taken legal actions in the past that have been effective and have shut down multiple major review brokers. The people have been sued for this stuff for a long time.
Amazon and Google face UK CMA probe over fake reviews
The group called "Amazon Product Review" had more than 40,000 members before it was taken down by Facebook.
Amazon says that it will use the discovery process to identify bad actors and remove fake reviews that haven't already been detected by Amazon's advanced technology.
Thousands and thousands of illegitimate reviews push products across the online retailer's massive digital storefront all around the world. Regulators are taking notice, which is bound to light a fire under the online shopping monolith.
Reviews that boost product ratings have been a problem for years. An investigation by the Washington Post found that fake reviews dominated some products.
The cottage industry sold fake reviews on Facebook. The Post reported that sellers court Amazon shoppers on Facebook across a number of networks to give glowing feedback in exchange for money or other compensation.
Last year, Amazon acknowledged the problem in a post. Due to our continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad actors buying and selling accounts, we have seen an increasing trend of bad actors trying to solicit fake reviews outside of Amazon.
More than 1,000 review groups were reported by Amazon in the first quarter of 2021. Whether that speaks to the prevalence of fake reviews or the online retailer taking the issue more seriously isn't clear, but the company was keen to pass the blame onto social media companies.
Internet companies are failing to eradicate fake reviews because they aren't the worst type of misleading content. Systemic problems can get out of control when you have a large amount of cash-burning internet machine. Sometimes the problems encourage bad or weird things. It is difficult to untangle the mess the big money machine made when there is a small industry of people cashing in on bad products.
Amazon and Google face UK CMA probe over fake reviews
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