Global retailer Amazon has filed a lawsuit against the administrators of over 10,000 Facebook groups who pay buyers to post lies as reviews about products sold on its marketplace.
One of the groups identified in the lawsuit is “Amazon Product Review”, which had more than 43,000 members.
There are more groups on Facebook and other social media platforms. The cumulative number of fake reviewers runs into millions.
Amazon used to allow buyers to give product reviews whether they were paid to do so or not. However, due to the significant number of sponsored reviews verifed to be false, the company now allows only vetted members of its review programme Vine to give paid reviews. However, paid reviews continued in the shadows and grew into an elaborate lying game.
Popular online stores, Amazon, eBay, Google app store, and others have been in a long brawl with fake reviewers. Amazon has said that it has technologies that flag these fake reviews. It said it stopped over 200 million suspected fake reviews before they were seen by customers in 2020. It also asserted that it takes proactive legal action against bad actors such as this lawsuit
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has emphasised that it’s working with Amazon and will continue to work across the industry to curtail spam and fake reviews.
Amazon’s investigations show that groups of fake reviewers are hiding from Facebook’s detection tools by swapping letters in words or replacing them with symbols during conversations. For example, “R*fnd Aftr R*vew” (refund after review).
Well, let’s see how many of them can continue to escape the letters of the law.
