Amazon targets admins behind thousands of fake review Facebook groups

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon is taking legal action against admins of over 10,000 Facebook groups that it says facilitate fake reviews for products on its platform by promising money or free products. The groups are accused of faking reviews on Amazon in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan. The group called "Amazon Product Review" had over 42,000 members.

As third-party marketplace sellers make up a bigger and bigger proportion of sales on its platform, the problem of fake reviews has become more pressing. An investigation by the Financial Times found that as many as nine out of the top ten reviewers on its platform in the UK were engaged in suspicious activity four years later. Some of the tactics used across the network of Facebook groups aimed at facilitating fake reviews have been exposed.

The e-commerce giant has been fighting these inauthentic reviews for years, taking legal action against the brokers that facilitate them as well as the Amazon sellers who buy them. In today's press release, the company says it has over 12,000 employees worldwide working to prevent fraud and abuse on its platform, which includes fake reviews.

Amazon uses advanced technology, expert investigators, and continuous monitoring to detect fake reviews on its service. Hundreds of sellers have been kicked off its platform for violating its policies over the past year. Over 200 million fake reviews were stopped in 2020.

"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."

Meta, a social media company, is shoring up its policies against fake reviews, and the UK's competition regulator is looking into the issue. The public and private sectors need to work together to address the issue.