Amazon has taken further steps toward policing its long-term problems with fake product reviews. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the tech giant filed a lawsuit in Washington’s King County Superior Court against more than 10,000 Facebook account administrators. The lawsuit alleges that the administrators used the Facebook accounts to coordinate and systematically generate fake product reviews on Amazon’s platform. The Facebook sites incentivized the submission of misleading reviews for Amazon stores in the United States, UK, Spain, France, Germany, and Japan.
This is not the first time that Amazon has gone to court to halt false and misleading product reviews. In 2015, Amazon filed a lawsuit against 1,114 defendants that advertised a review service on the website Fiverr. However, Amazon acknowledged that the action did not act as a deterrent, as the scammers continue to find avenues for circumventing rules and outsmarting the algorithms that find and remove false reviews.
Amazon has taken criticism for not doing enough to resolve its issues around false reviews. In 2019, US Lawmakers sent Amazon a letter questioning the company’s efforts toward blocking false and misleading product reviews. And in 2019, the Federal Trade Commission fined a retail operation for paying a third party to solicit Amazon reviews.
Amazon has an anti-manipulation policy governing product reviews. The policy states that the company will take legal action against sellers and manufacturers that post fraudulent reviews and those organizations and individuals that provide the fraudulent reviews. Amazon says it has 10,000 employees working on security and preventing fraud. The company claims to have stopped over 200 million fake reviews from reaching consumers in 2020.
Despite lawsuits, algorithms, and a dedicated security team, Amazon continues to be plagued by scammers that find avenues for posting false and misleading reviews. As a result, consumers need to evaluate Amazon product reviews with skepticism and learn how to spot fake reviews.
Dil Bole Oberoi
