Fake reviews are not common on Amazon. Now the mail-order company has launched a counterattack and filed a lawsuit against the managers of more than 10,000 Facebook groups.
Product reviews are helpful to many people when shopping online. But if you scroll through the reviews, you often notice posts that don’t really make sense.
This is due to the large number of fake reviews that are now battling it out on many Internet portals. Amazon now wants to fight back and announced on Monday A lawsuit has been filed against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups.
What do fake reviews on Amazon have to do with Facebook groups?
A business around fake reviews has established itself in Facebook groups. This is where people giving false product reviews on Amazon congregate. They get paid for their fake reviews or receive free products as a bonus.
According to Amazon, stores in the USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan were affected.
Amazon has already shut down “millions of suspicious reviews” before customers see them, says Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of partner selling services. With the lawsuit, the group wants to go one step further in order to “expose the perpetrators on social media”.
Proactive legal action against bad actors is one of the many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors to account.
One of the groups involved in the lawsuit called itself the Amazon Product Review. Meta deleted the group, which has more than 43,000 members, earlier this year.
But this deletion only happened on the advice of Amazon. Administrators previously tried to infiltrate Facebook’s deletion network – for example by using wrong characters in problematic formulas.
How is Amazon dealing with fake reviews so far?
According to Amazon, it employs more than 12,000 people worldwide who are dedicated to protecting against fraud and abuse. This also includes tracking down fake reviews.
A special team takes care of fake comments on social media. Since 2020, Amazon Meta has reported 10,000 fake taxonomy groups.
More than half of the groups have been banned by the Meta for violating the guidelines. The activities of the other groups are still under investigation.
In the year 2020 alone, Amazon tracked down and deleted more than 200 million suspected fake reviews.
How important are product ratings to a buying decision?
Reviews from other customers should not be underestimated. that has already shown Online Shopper Survey On the importance of product reviews from 2011.
According to this, 64 percent of those surveyed like to use other customer reviews and tips. Even 63 percent say the comment function has improved consumers’ capabilities to influence things.
And even in 2020, the importance has not diminished. according to Bitkom survey In 2020, about 66 percent of 16-29-year-olds surveyed read customer reviews before making a purchase.
Between 30 and 49 years old, the rate was 60 percent. Among those over 65, about 40 percent of those surveyed use the online review tool.
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