Amazon ‘flooded by fake five-star reviews’ – report

My issue with Amazon reviews is the ease that sellers are able to change the product and keep the reviews. I recently tried to buy a decent pair of USB C headphones. The top two recommended products both had 5 starts with hundreds of verified reviews... for a dvd copy of a classic movie. I've decided I just can't trust Amazon reviews anymore.

A couple months ago, I googled &#x27;whiteboard amazon&#x27;, clicked the first result, and was taken to a well structured amazon page for a whiteboard that had 5 stars. Looking at it a little closer, I noticed that of the 143 reviews, 143 were 5 star reviews. On top of it, every review followed a similar structure, was made by an account that had thousands of 5 star reviews, and was so beyond the pale obvious fraudulent that I felt the need to email jeff@amazon.<p>Today I was looking at some vitamins, and I checked every single result for a certain supplement that was 4 or 5 stars and every single one of them ranked D or worse on FakeSpot.<p>How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this? 100% of reviews coming in for a product on the same day? MAYBE THAT&#x27;S A SIGN, AMAZON.<p>Amazon reviews are worse than garbage now.

It&#x27;s not just the fake reviews that bug me. I can use fakespot to weed through a few of those. The thing that has really made Amazon less usable for me in the last year or so is seeing the exact same product twenty times under different nonsense-word brands. Recalling a recent example, in about a minute I can find the exact same pair of water shoes sold as: gracosy, MAYZERO, LINGTOM, Wonesion, JointlyCreating, Centipede Demon, hiitave, and more. Another one is Belilent, Alibress, SUOKENI, Zhuanglin, Dreamcity, and so on. Same pictures, almost same descriptive text, with only minor cosmetic differences.<p>Are these different companies that happen to use the same supplier? It&#x27;s possible, but it could also be one company creating multiple pseudo-brands to game the system. I could probably even find out, but <i>I don&#x27;t care</i>. The same physical thing shipped for the same price from the same Chinese factory shouldn&#x27;t show up twenty times. As long as search results are filled with crap, they&#x27;re useless. It&#x27;s the combination of fake reviews <i>and</i> this kind of flooding that makes me want to leave and never come back.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but at some point in the last year or so I completely lost trust in purchasing goods on Amazon.<p>I’ve been a Prime customer since Prime launched. I loved it for a decade. It used to be an automatic reflex for me: need something? Type it in Amazon and click buy.<p>But now I don’t trust Amazon search results at all, and when I do purchase I only do it via direct product links from other sites I trust (like Wirecutter or the manufacturer’s site). Increasingly I buy direct from the brands websites.<p>I wanted to drop Prime this year. My wife argued we should keep it because the kids watch a lot of Prime Video. But we’ve already got Netflix, and with Disney launching their thing I think I’d rather buy that than stick with Prime any longer.<p>Not sure where Amazon is headed, and I wish the fate of AWS and Whole Foods weren’t at least somewhat tied up in the fate of Amazon’s retail operation.

I received an email at least once a month, to an address I used exclusively for Amazon purchases, inviting me to join a website that will reimburse me via PayPal if I purchase products and review them.<p>I have forwarded the emails to Amazon a couple times explaining that my email address is used exclusively for them making it easier to narrow down who might be sending these emails. They always respond with a warning that my account might be suspended if I partake in such sites.

I wish I kept a link, but there was looking to buy a book on music theory or something similar. One of the books had 13 or so reviews, all glowing. Many were of the form &quot;Exactly what I was looking for!&quot; or &quot;Just perfect!&quot; with nothing more.<p>Two of them had the same surprising word that made no sense in the context of the sentence: both reviews used the word &quot;goal.&quot; Then it hit me: either the directions telling them what to review or in their own attempt to translate to English, the auto-translation picked the wrong synonym, choosing &quot;goal&quot; instead of &quot;score.&quot;

I never thought it would get that way but I feel more comfortable now buying from ebay from a seller with good feedback. Amazon is such a cesspool of weird sellers. For example I looked for flashes of Godox brand. Listings had &quot;Godox&quot; in the title but when I looked at the listings they were all from different sellers and not from Godox. I think is intentionally misleading by Amazon. As a tech person I sort of understand what&#x27;s going on but a lot of people trust Amazon and don&#x27;t understand that Amazon isn&#x27;t really the seller and does nothing against sleazy listings.

One product (power bricks for MacBooks) had over 1000 5 stars, then the 1 star reviews came in where people actually had their power adapters catch on fire. Amazon, or maybe the seller, shut the review&#x2F;product down. Now, it&#x27;s back:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;KUPPET-MacBook-17inch-Compatible-MacBooks-Produced&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07P56DJLV&#x2F;ref=mp_s_a_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=Kuppet+macbook&amp;qid=1555375810&amp;s=gateway&amp;sr=8-1-fkmrnull" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;KUPPET-MacBook-17inch-Compatible-MacB...</a><p>Lots of verified purchases. All the reviews are within the same date range. It doesn&#x27;t take machine learning or advanced AI to catch this; a simple SQL statement should be enough to flag these. But still, they persist.

I&#x27;ve started using fakespot.com for every purchase from Amazon, has saved me from making a bad purchase more than once.

If you are buying electronics, buy it from Best Buy, Costco, Target, Walmart or another retailer with a physical store. Best Buy matches Amazon&#x27;s prices and their merchandise is not fake.

Reply All did a great podcast in Amazon&#x27;s recent drop in quality: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gimletmedia.com&#x2F;reply-all&#x2F;124" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gimletmedia.com&#x2F;reply-all&#x2F;124</a><p>Highly recommend.

I recently ordered a small device from Amazon, it was poor, so I gave it a 1 star rating with a short, negative review.<p>About a week later, I received an e-mail from the seller (via Amazon&#x27;s payments communication system) asking for me to delete my review in return for being refunded the total amount, and stating that I could keep the device.<p>Whilst I didn&#x27;t take up their offer, I assume many others did which shows how Amazon is &#x27;not flooded with one-star reviews&#x27;.

I no longer buy from Amazon: batteries, chargers, flash drives&#x2F;SD cards, any sort of food (or container for food)<p>essentially only stuff that&#x27;s completely obvious if it&#x27;s fake, or if it&#x27;s too expensive&#x2F;niche to bother counterfeiting

Is it possible there&#x27;s a gulf between Amazon.com and Amazon.ca when it comes to these issues?<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just in what I shop for but I haven&#x27;t received a single counterfeit item, or come across fraudulent listings.<p>I&#x27;ve seen my fair share of imitation (and probably trademark-infringing) products and cheap crap, but I try and avoid that stuff.<p>So my experience has largely been positive—but there&#x27;s no shortage of horror stories. That seems the norm around this board.<p>So I wonder is it just worse on the American side? (for reasons of volume or targeted marketing or whatever)

I reported 4 fake reviews to Amazon on a product I purchased before.<p>The product page had changed from the old one I originally purchased on to a new one with 4 obviously fake 5-star reviews. I found this when I went to re-purchase the product after it (an eBike) was stolen. The page is here (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07K2VLSX5&#x2F;ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_HeDTCbV67NR82" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07K2VLSX5&#x2F;ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_He...</a>)<p>There is a review from me, calling out the fakes and providing detail, and the other 4 that are clear-as-day fakes. The previous product page, which I referenced in my report to Amazon, had numerous high quality, legit reviews averaging around 3 stars with tons of detail.<p>Amazon has made no changes after my report.

I use Amazon a lot but I won&#x27;t buy expensive brand-name stuff there anymore. Case in point: I am going to buy a Starrett combination square and Amazon has a nice price with free shipping, but I&#x27;d bet there is a 50&#x2F;50 chance I get a counterfeit.<p>I&#x27;d also put your chances of getting a fake $9 Casio watch on Amazon at 50&#x2F;50.<p>As a software engineer I kinda sympathize with Amazon -- no matter what system you come up with, people are going to game it. It&#x27;s a very complex moving target and you will never be able to eradicate all of the scammers. At the same time, I think they could do a lot better than they do today, and I wonder if they actually try.

When buying on Amazon, I&#x27;m mostly interested in the 2-4 range reviews; I find this is where people discuss the pros&#x2F;cons instead of just the pros (5 - best product ever!1!) and just the worst (1 - it had a defect because I threw it in the pool even though it said don&#x27;t throw it in the pool and the company doesn&#x27;t want to reimburse me, never buying from it again yadayada - kind of reviews).

&quot;Online retail giant Amazon&#x27;s website is flooded with fake five-star reviews for products from brands it has never heard of, consumer group Which? has claimed.&quot;<p>Took me about 5 times reading that to realize &quot;it&quot; referred to &quot;consumer group Which?&quot;<p>I think the question mark in the name helped throw me off...

I am always starting from bad reviews. Ironically, very often they are the source of the information which makes me buy a product immediately.<p>E.g. if the book author is &quot;arrogant&quot;, or most product problems are coming from hysterical idiots with none of them due to the manufacturer.

My theory is that amazon’s new business model is increasingly going to be based on advertising.<p>Reliable reviews are incompatible with advertising revenue (why else would you have to advertise heavily if your products are really the best).<p>The same observation may explain the doscountinuation of Amazon Button. Button would reorder the same product&#x2F;brand over and over again - not compatible with advertising by competitors.

What bothers more even more is the injection of sponsored ads that ignore not just the keywords you search for, but even the filters like price.<p>I search for a brand name watch or camera with a price of 300$+ and half of the results are no-name knockoff 25$ watches without even an easy visual way to distinguish them. They just put a very faint &quot;Sponsored&quot; that you have to squint hard to see it.

I buy my supplements like vitamins, protein bars and powder from Amazon. The stock mingling and counterfeits is worrying me now. Should I switch to local shops or am i being too paranoid? For non edibles, with all the fake review sites out there, are sites like the wirecutter and consumer report still trust worthy?

My cynical nature assumes some Amazon MBA has done the math and concluded that the gain in revenue from Amazon-only brands will exceed that lost from people abandoning the rest. This is based on the <i>assumption</i> that Amazon&#x27;s Fulfilled By Amazon cobranding program does not allow third party participation for Amazon&#x27;s in-house brands like Amazon Basic.<p>In light of that admittedly negative view what&#x27;s Amazon&#x27;s motivation to limit fake reviews since it doesn&#x27;t damage their own brands, albeit at the cost of damaging their brand as a whole.

How about simply filtering amazon reviews that are only left by people with a wide variety of expenditure and who spend over $500&#x2F;year?

The only reviews worth reading on any site are 1 and 2-star reviews. I honestly don’t care if someone is happy with a product, I want to know what the problems might happen or what situations it doesn’t work for.<p>I recently paid for a Consumer Reports digital subscription to get reviews for appliances and it’s been worth every penny of the very reasonable $35 annual subscription.

This is my go to tool when dealing with Amazon reviews: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fakespot.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fakespot.com&#x2F;</a><p>99% of products feature a least some of fake 5 stars. Only very good brands don&#x27;t rely on them, I usually buy from them even if they have 4-star rating.

I would pay substantially more than Amazon prices for a store that actually curated their inventory to offer quality stuff instead of a firehose of algorithmically-reviewed trash.<p>I shop at Amazon only for the selection, not the experience. Not even for the price.

They are trying to fix the problem, but the number of scammers dwarfs the number of Amazon employees: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;what-is-amazon.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;what-is-amazon.html</a><p>That said, Amazon could buy Fakespot or one of its competitors with small change from Jeff Bezos&#x27; sofa, and they are clearly doing a better job than Amazon at rooting out fraudulent reviews.<p>Ironically, Amazon&#x27;s enforcement was turned against them. Unscrupulous merchants are planting obviously fake five-star reviews on their competitors. Amazon then takes down the framed competitor. Genius!

Not only fake positive reviews, amazon postings are saturated with fake negative reviews and counterfeit and knock-off products (95% of cheap electronics). But it&#x27;s not an amazon problem, it&#x27;s a customer problem. Amazon monopolized online market and destroyed other sellers. If they bring order it would lead to honest prices for honest products and would allow other sellers back to the market. Why should amazon do so? It&#x27;s better for them to forfeit this market than give up a share of it.

Star-based reviews basically need to go away. There just isn’t any reasonable way to process the information contained in the rating itself. I know that I <i>always</i> think twice about a purchase when there are mediocre reviews, despite knowing all the ways that the reviews could be basically outright lies, because I know I don’t plan to spend all the time it would require to actually discern real from fake.<p>I was thinking about how even simplified systems like thumbs-up&#x2F;thumbs-down for music don’t make sense either. In my car, there is a great way that they could <i>infer</i> what I like: how long is it playing? I essentially will let at least half a song keep playing if I like it, whereas I will quickly flip away from one I don’t want. I am <i>more</i> likely to flip to the next song than click a thumbs-down, especially while driving. “Time actually played”, perhaps as a percentage of total song length, would probably be a great way to automatically rank my music for me.<p>And I think it would work for Amazon and other systems too. For example, if a product was purchased and never returned, maybe it doesn’t suck. If it’s a consumable item that was purchased again, maybe it doesn’t suck. We don’t need reviews and star ratings to figure this kind of thing out, and it’s extremely hard to fake.

I once wrote an Amazon review in which I said that the other reviews followed a pattern of manipulation. Amazon deleted my review, and sent me a warning letter : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BenKrasnow&#x2F;status&#x2F;1106385729435787264?s=19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BenKrasnow&#x2F;status&#x2F;1106385729435787264?s=...</a>

I trust the verified reviewers especially those that post pictures of the item. For example if I am buying a computer case and someone posts a review with the case and their system inside and they say the airflow is good and the build experience is great too then that adds a lot more weight than 100 five star reviews.

Oh, and the keyword stuffing is horribly obvious and Amazon&#x27;s antispam team should get in touch with Google&#x27;s. These product pages should be flagged for keyword stuffing, suspended until fixed and permanently banned for repeat offenders.<p>It&#x27;s horrible and extremely user-unfriendly.

When I first heard of sites like JD.com and Alibaba, I visited out of curiosity and noped out fast. The UX was horrible, the sites were a jumbled mess, and I&#x27;d see the same product marked up at different prices, and a bunch of fake-seeming reviews. &quot;Thank God we have Amazon here&quot;, I thought.<p>Tried searching for bluetooth headphones on Amazon Canada (which has a much smaller selection than the US site). It was almost exactly as I remember the old Chinese ecommerce site. Wall-to-wall rows of indistinguishable products, 500+ 5 star reviews for each, many of which are obviously for other products.<p>Lately, the Prime app hasn&#x27;t even been working on my PS3, so it might be time to start moving back to brick and mortar for my purchases.

lots of examples of fake reviews on goods that show up in common search results:<p>e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.ca&#x2F;Bluetooth-Headphones-Sweatproof-Compatible-Smartphones&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07PG3QXBP&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.ca&#x2F;Bluetooth-Headphones-Sweatproof-Compat...</a><p>clicking through on a reviewer shows, for example, an account with 82 5-star reviews, all posted today, April 15th:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.ca&#x2F;gp&#x2F;profile&#x2F;amzn1.account.AFZWITCLSKYQHSYAVPNXTZZH2FMQ&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.ca&#x2F;gp&#x2F;profile&#x2F;amzn1.account.AFZWITCLSKYQH...</a><p>Seems like posting 82 5-star reviews in a single day should probably trigger some sort of anti-fraud mechanism?

Why even bother allowing unverified purchase reviews?

News at 11.<p>Seriously? Go hang out at Amazon for a hot second. You&#x27;ll see:<p><pre><code> 1. Fraudulent products 2. Fake products 3. Ripoff obvious clones 4. Fake stores 5. Fake reviews (5 star AND good 1 star like the bot got mixed up) 6. Bad of the above mixed in the supply of the &quot;good&quot; legit products 7. Amazon Piss bottles (0) </code></pre> Amazon is now, what Walmart was 10 years ago - a scourge and a horror to work at for any length of time. It&#x27;s no surprise that a company that was to sell off even more underlying ethics would be walmart at their own game.(1) In that, Walmart only has the upper hand because of local stores...<p>(0) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;16&#x2F;amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-into-bottles-to-avoid-wasting-time-undercover-investigator&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;16&#x2F;amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-i...</a><p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;30&#x2F;meditations-on-moloch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;30&#x2F;meditations-on-moloch&#x2F;</a>

After receiving fake items a few times, I just stopped buying from Amazon altogether. Especially now that Amazon collects taxes for my state, it is just easier to go to a brick and mortar store and buy legitimate products in person.

Amazon reviews are a huge issue and a huge let down from the platform. I love shopping on Amazon but today, I rarely do it due to 1) not believe any review 2) seeing the same product branded twenty times.<p>Various teams at Amazon need to do a rewrite of the entire reviews specs and treat them like CC details. It&#x27;s totally abnormal to find reviews about another product belonging to a former product from the same seller. It&#x27;s unacceptable to have most of the reviews on new products coming from paid gigs and fakers.<p>They need to sort this quick – even my mother who barely understands a thing to computers is now wary of Amazon reviews.

&quot;ReviewMeta, a US-based website that analyses online reviews, said it was shocked at the scale of the unverified reviews, saying they were &quot;obvious and easy to prevent&quot;.&quot;<p><i>Unverified</i> reviews may be easy to prevent by disabling unverified reviews, but then the scam just includes one extra step, having each account reviewing a product purchase the item on Amazon, then reimburse the account. Easy verified purchase.<p>You also would lose out on actual purchasers who bought it elsewhere than Amazon who would want to leave reviews.<p>The problem of bad reviews is definitely an unsolved problem, as even if you build in trust mechanisms (and Amazon surely does this already), the scammers will build networks of self-reinforcing bots. You could calibrate the system to heavily discount reviews of reviewers which have any &quot;scam&quot; tags, but then the networks would just take longer to build, leaving legit reviews to build up trust, and then leaving false reviews after having built up that trust. These cat and mouse games will go on a long time.<p>The same issues happen across every open network where identity isn&#x27;t verified. As much as I (and others historically) have benefited from pseudonymity, it&#x27;s definitely being weaponized (Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc) to benefit certain entities (companies, governments, etc), and the ultimate result is a loss of trust in the networks at large. I don&#x27;t know what the solution will be, but the solution will be incredibly valuable.<p>I&#x27;ve thought about some sort of hybrid account handle system where you have one account that has two handles associated with it -- one, your real-world name, and another your pseudonym, but the single account is verified by real-world ID. As a contributor to the network, you could post as your pseudonym or your real world name, depending on the contribution that you are comfortable making, and as a consumer of the network, you could choose at any time to only view content of the network posted by real-world names, or pseudonyms. This would limit the number of possible astroturfed accounts, but still allow for sensitive discussion of heated matters.<p>Just throwing the idea out there because the need for some kind of solution to this destruction in network quality is something that affects us all.

It has gotten awful. Every single time I&#x27;ve searched for a generic product (or even a specific brand + model), I&#x27;m inundated with these nonsense branded listings. I&#x27;m very close to canceling my Prime membership.<p>I think the best thing that Amazon has accomplished is pushing other retailers to improve their fulfillment process. Just yesterday, instead of dealing with the endless stream of copycat products on Amazon, I purchased a bunch of running gear directly from Nike and it was shipped in less than 12 hours.

Nice to see, that the main stream media takes note of services like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewmeta.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewmeta.com&#x2F;</a> . There is also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fakespot.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fakespot.com&#x2F;</a> . Both services show, how bad Amazons filter for fake reviews really are. I still believe Amazon is basically doing nothing to prevent fake reviews.

Amazon needs to disallow unverified reviews. Their current acceptance is a holdover from a time where people were much more likely to have bought a product somewhere other than Amazon. Amazon needed these outside reviews to curate its own offerings and give customers confidence in their shopping choices. That hasn&#x27;t been the case for a decade now. Amazon should delete all non-verified reviews entirely.

As everyone&#x27;s pointing out, this problem seems to have exploded in the past 1-2 years.<p>I myself had a few trivial counterfeit purchases (batteries, lightbulbs) and one serious one: a ladder. The rung snapped out from under me, and it was dumb luck that I wasn&#x27;t seriously injured. Anyhow, it&#x27;s time to move on. Amazon is moving into advertising, and the convenience no longer outweighs the other costs.

The many problems with Amazon reviews are hardly news to most of us on HN, I&#x27;m sure. What is noteworthy, though, is to see such a report make the front page of the BBC News site. I think we easily forget just how little public awareness there is of issues that are obvious to us as &quot;insiders&quot; in the tech world. Anything that helps to raise awareness, even just a little, is welcome.

I bought some cologne from Amazon, (seller was listed as &quot;Amazon&quot;) which turned out to be fake. The scent was wrong, the bottle... except the box which seemed authentic but had the barcode excised with a razor and covered up with a sticker.<p>When I left a straightforward review, it was taken down with no explanation and no recourse. I called and got a refund, but the fake 5-star reviews are all still up.

Forgive me for being naive, but isn&#x27;t this an easy problem to solve? Amazon tracks shipments, I assume. Couldn&#x27;t they just create a mechanism where a completed shipment gives the purchaser one allowance for adding a review? This way you can only review if Amazon has verified that you bought the product.<p>I must be missing something crucial here.

I&#x27;ve even been offered free products by a retailer that I have purchased an item from - &#x27;Free Dash Cam&#x27; read the email subject line and provided me with all of the instruction with what to do, and a copy and pastable bit of text to use aswell - I reported this to Amazon, and gave them copies of the emails etc too.

One useful hack is to use the DuckDuckGo bang command &quot;!fake&quot; to check the fakespot rating for a listing.<p>If you have DDG set as your default browser you can just prepend &quot;!fake&quot; (no quotes) before the url and get a breakdown on the review authenticity.<p>(Interestingly sometimes even AmazonBasics products have a bad fakespot rating...)

Is there any facet of human society that hasn&#x27;t been subverted by the relentless pursuit of profit?<p>Other than heavy-handed regulation (like verifying each and every account as unique), some form of guaranteed minimum income may be the only way to buffer people from resorting to such deceptive tactics in order to get by in the world.

This article talks about unverified purchases, but in my experience, a lot of verified purchases are also fake. I have stopped trusting positive reviews and only go through the negative reviews and assess the product.<p>How to spot fake reviews - They are long, explain the product in detail and similar to other fake reviews.

If we can sort out spam emails with Naive Bayes, why can&#x27;t we sort out spam reviews in similar fashion? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering</a>

Link to the actual report by Which?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.which.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;thousands-of-fake-customer-reviews-found-on-popular-tech-categories-on-amazon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.which.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;thousands-of-fake-custo...</a>

This is why I just pretend 5 star reviews don&#x27;t exist. I figure all the other reviews are probably legit and look at them. If all the other reviews are 1 or 2 star I&#x27;m not going to buy it. If there are 4 star and 3 star reviews it&#x27;s probably decent.

I&#x27;m always on the boat of: &quot;The community votes what to read&quot; but I&#x27;ve seen this subject on the HN&#x27;s home page over and over and over.<p>Isn&#x27;t this an old story?<p>Are people discovering this about Amazon&#x27;s reviews and upvoting out of curiosity or am I reading HN way too frequently?

Fake reviews are common on Airbnb.com as well. New hosts just request their friends to book their house and then pay them back for the same. In this case Airbnb may even benefit (unlike Amazon) since they receive their non-refundable fee when a friend books the house.

It&#x27;s not just Amazon its everything. Companies spend large quantities of money on media control, we all know this. I probably a hand full of media companies in the USA, China, and India that are selling a review control service.

www.fakespot.com is your friend.

I check everything on Reviewmeta.com because of this. Wish they a bit better search&#x2F;categorization though. Awesome site nonetheless, filtering out suspicious reviews to provide a &quot;true rating&quot;.

1. Bots<p>2. Click-farms buying clicks from humans in India, Malaysia, countries in Africa, etc.<p>3. Mostly, but not all, Chinese distributers and manufacturers offering inducements, bonuses and generally cajoling customers for 5 star reviews.

For product sellers it&#x27;s also very frustrating. Hard to compete against tricks. For sellers the fake reviews are only 1 of many similar problems with fraudsters, trickers, scammers, etc.

We can see that the dynamics of ratings are very complicated. It&#x27;s not about the system&#x27;s design, but also the load and bias on decisions from the buyer and the seller.

If the purchasing base (or potential buyers) believe the reviews to be mostly fake, they may lose trust in the service...<p>This seems like a problem worth fixing, from Amazon&#x27;s perspective.

What about the dating sites flooded with scammers pretending to be women, trying to make you visit porn sites. They are pretty easy to spot after a little bit.

Is there an extension that just hides all non-verified reviews? I want reviews from people who at least paid for the item.

unverified != fake!!<p>Most of my reviews are &quot;unverified&quot;, because I purchase elsewhere. But because amazon is a great aggregator of reviews, I want to pay it back by helping others.<p>Now of course, there are indeed many fake reviews, but this article does a terrible job of explaining the situation.

&quot;Bought on Amazon&quot; is becoming the new &quot;Made in China&quot;.

Ignore the score - pull up the critical reviews and look for common themes.

Amazon, Booking.com&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Reddit&#x2F;TripAdvisor&#x2F;Twitter<p>Fake reviews&#x2F;accounts are one of the main issues social media and Content generation sites are facing these days.<p>One of the solutions is using Blockchain&#x2F; or do a quick verification process (Like upwork for example)

This is the sound of one of the AI bubbles going <i>POP</i><p>Expect more frequency to come. Expect it to overcorrect so that AI is a dirty word sometime soon and fantastic uses of statistical learning will be poison in funding. It&#x27;s all so predictable even an algo can see it coming.

Have you been living under the rock?<p>Since when &quot;no news&quot; is a news?

Amazon lets people sell $5 Ikea items for $45. Fuck them.

Amazon should at the least stop unverified reviews.

Amazon - the company that broke online shopping.

AliExpress is worse. Fake&#x2F;low-quality products just disappear completely and there&#x27;s very few, short reviews. It&#x27;s almost as bad as eBay.

Look, mahcine learning is hard guys, we need to give amazon another few years to work out the kinks and then no more false reviews ever again...

&#x27;r&#x2F;flooded by&#x2F;depends on&#x2F;&#x27;

I’ve commented on how scammy Amazon is multiple times on here. For whatever reason I feel like there are more people on HN ready to defend Amazon than not and call out those who say it’s become scammy as “overreacting.”

Like everything else online, do your research. I assume we all know plenty of people who have taken online reviews at face value, I have done it myself. Like most other things on the internet, they can be faked. It is sad that people take advantage of good faith systems like this and do not feel the consequences.<p>Side note: Having the consumer group be named &quot;Which?&quot; and to include the question mark in it makes it jolting to read in the middle of a sentence. I can&#x27;t tell if I like the name or dislike it a lot.