Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

Amazon is going downhill quickly. I target shoot with a compound bow as a hobby, and as a result I usually buy a set of arrows a year. In 2015 when I would search for &quot;target arrows&quot; on Amazon the first page results would be for legit American companies who make exceptional arrows for about $30 per set of 6. Now, and for the last 2 years if I search for &quot;target arrows&quot; I get pages and pages of Chinese crap arrows (I purchased several sets and returned them). The crappy ones are also selling for $30 per set but they are made out of weak aluminum and come bent up. To get the nice American made ones I have to got 10-20 pages deep or search by brand name and even than the real ones are usually on page 2 with page one featuring the same crap from China. Now, don&#x27;t get me wrong, I am sure they can make quality arrows in China, but what makes it to the top of Amazon is utter crap.<p>I noticed this with many other products as well, but the arrows is a particularly noticeable example because it&#x27;s something I regularly replace as they get beat up and destroyed (I shoot a lot).

I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full-time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn’t do anything against them on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so (but this is one of many Fakespot metrics).<p>I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every product was crap with fake reviewing. After wasting an hour on this I ended up not buying from Amazon. Rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese crap and counterfeit industry on their platform is likely to become Amazon’s death if they don’t admit their mistake and turn the wheel now.

Shit like this is what made me lose confidence in Amazon and I stopped my prime subscription.<p>My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart at the seams. Welp, Amazon said they can’t refund me.<p>Multiple times my packages are either not delivered on time or aren’t delivered at all. 2 times they were half way across the state. When I called them to ask, they wanted me to confirm my address since they magically and suddenly couldn’t find my address anymore. Well guys you’ve delivered 10k+ worth of goods to me at this address this year alone. WTF?!<p>My customer service experience also degraded every other instance. When they missed my last delivery date I called them and threatened to cancel and the rep said “Sure, Sir, let me do that after I reorder this item”. He figured it was quicker or reorder an item than wait for it to get back from across the state.

Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

*-star reviews on all of the major review sites are 2-dimensional. They should be 3 dimensional (0-x stars) + time. This way if clusters of 5-star reviews show up in an extremely short period of time it&#x27;s a red flag. Instead of seeing a static &quot;this product&#x2F;service got x stars&quot;, we should be able to see &quot;this product&#x2F;service, within the last 1 month, received on average x stars&quot;. And then you can extrapolate, oh they received on average 2 stars before they upgraded their product, and now the product is getting 4 stars. Or something like: &quot;this restaurant was getting on average 1.5 stars last year, but recently they&#x27;re getting glowing reviews. Maybe they fired the manager?&quot;.

Also this very interesting Planet Money episode #838 about people all over the world receiving weird packages full of random Chinese items that they never ordered.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;money&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;27&#x2F;606528176&#x2F;episode-838-a-series-of-mysterious-packages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;money&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;27&#x2F;606528176&#x2F;epis...</a><p>Turns out they are phantom packages from vendors on Ali Baba and TaoBao gaming the review system. This is called &quot;brushing&quot;.<p>They managed to interview a &quot;brusher&quot;. So the brushers have to make themselves look completely real during the buying process, hesitating, clicking links from different vendors and only after a while select the actual item they target. To get the &quot;verified purchase&quot; tag something has to be mailed somewhere. But instead of the actual item the vendor sends a package with random stuff and sometimes they send these to addresses of previous unknowing international customers to make it look more real.

I feel unaffected by such fake reviews as the only ones I ascribe much value to are the negative ones. Also, I&#x27;ve extremely curtailed any purchasing on Amazon as I&#x27;ve come to perceive the majority of their marketplace to be a degenerative crap house.

Let&#x27;s not forget that these fake reviews are being paid for. That&#x27;s clearly better than non-paid-for fake reviews. That is, there&#x27;s <i>some</i> friction for the malicious actors.<p>Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.<p>This is all to say that it looks like Amazon and others (e.g., Steam) are doing the right thing in requiring a verified purchase in order to leave a review.<p>But it does seem like there&#x27;s an easy improvement that Amazon could make: offer amnesty to people who report (after the fact) that they left a fake review. The review would be marked internally as fake (and this would impact rankings, etc.) but the vendor would be none the wiser.

A bit off topic, but companies&#x2F;organizations that use punctuation in their name make sentences look screwy. The organization in this article is “Which?” which the Guardian faithfully reproduces (without the quote I used). As a result, every time the name of the organization comes at the end of a sentence, the Guardian doesn’t end it with a period, they end it with a question mark. This made me go back and reread at least one sentence because I thought I misread it. I read the sentence as a statement, not a question (and it was a statement.)

The fantastic podcast Reply All did an episode on this a few months ago: <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>

I was looking in Amazon for a protective case for the iPhone XR that my SO has preordered.<p>Apparently there are many cases and even more reviews of very happy customers (verified purchasers as per Amazon) who were making very positive comments on the perfect fit of the case (on a phone that is not yet on sale).

I don&#x27;t live in the US&#x2F;UK&#x2F;Europe so Amazon deliveries are things I pay a lot for and take a while to get to me. So when I buy something, I have to be damn sure I&#x27;m going to like it. That&#x27;s lead to the following strategy: filter reviews to only look at 1-star and 2-star reviews and make sure you can live with it if <i>all</i> the things people say there end up being true. It&#x27;s served me well so far and no amount of 5* reviews will change my decision to buy or not. Also, I look for things elsewhere, and only go to Amazon for buying, I don&#x27;t use their search. That helps a lot as well

&quot;use the reporting tools&quot; - as far as I&#x27;m aware there is no reporting tool for &quot;this product is fake&quot; and &quot;this review looks fake&quot;.<p>If they did want to fight fake reviews they would make reporting easy.<p>They&#x27;d also not allow completely different products to be listed on the same page.<p>...

A colleague recently pointed me to fakespot.com, where you paste the URL of a product (like an Amazon product) and (it seems) it does an ML type analysis to score the likelihood of fakeness in the aggregate of reviews with a score and then highlights the likely fake ones and why it thinks what it thinks.<p>There&#x27;s surely a market for verification for customers as much as there&#x27;s one for the criminally-minded sellers.

Great planet money podcast on this [1] with owner of site [2] that tries to surface fake reviews.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;templates&#x2F;transcript&#x2F;transcript.php?storyId=623988370" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;templates&#x2F;transcript&#x2F;transcript.php?stor...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewmeta.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewmeta.com&#x2F;</a>

This sort of thing seems pervasive these days. I see it on Yelp, Google Reviews and Amazon. (hell, the NYT has had pieces on people buying their competitors products en-masse just to give them 1-star reviews and move the relative needle in terms of Amazon reviews).<p>It will have to be fixed though, it seems that buying things sight unseen only really works when you have a lot of evidence (reviews) that the product is good.<p>Seems like a good way for an upstart to differentiate themselves.

Another example of Campbell&#x27;s Law playing out [0].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Campbell%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Campbell%27s_law</a>

Nowadays, going on Amazon for product hunt is equivalent to searching for a malware-free good quality torrent.

I now check fakespot before every Amazon purchase.

One way to solve this problem would be to create a curated directory of reputable sellers on amazon and just link to their products. Sprinkle some Algolia magic dust for search and voilà. Easier said than done but it’s a start.<p>Actually it seems one site&#x2F;app is doing that [0] haven’t tried it personally but they seem to have the right idea IMHO.<p>Edit: I should have linked directly to their about page [1]<p><pre><code> [0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;canopy.co [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;canopy.co&#x2F;about</code></pre>

Amazon is worth an enormous amount of money. They can afford to solve this problem. Here&#x27;s one idea: invite regular amazon users with accounts active for at least &gt; 1 year, who have some kind of verified identity&#x2F;address, and ask them to become certified reviewers. Give them amazon credits&#x2F;coupons in exchange for reviews of all the items they&#x27;ve purchased in the last 6-12 months (if they haven&#x27;t yet left a review for those items). Don&#x27;t pick people who have only been purchasing a few items from the same vendor. Find people who have a purchase history in line with the average user, not a company insider trying to game the system.<p>This way you don&#x27;t have this perverse practice of incentivizing people to leave positive reviews on items they want for free. If a reviewer is found to be fake&#x2F;scamming the system, just remove all their reviews and block them from future reviews.<p>It&#x27;s time to stop allowing the raw internet to leave reviews. The scammers have won. Time to move on to a more sophisticated filtering system. This feels like email before gmail came along and largely solved spam. It&#x27;ll get better again.

I use fakespot.com, and it’s surprising how often the ratings are deceptive. Just paste in any Amazon product URL.<p>For iOS, this shortcut makes it easier: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;shortcuts&#x2F;comments&#x2F;9id390&#x2F;check_amazon_review_quality_with_fakespot&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;shortcuts&#x2F;comments&#x2F;9id390&#x2F;check_ama...</a>

Even bigger issue on FB is fake ads. About 2 out of 3 ads I see are usually of some very bad product but with very attractive video and headline. I&#x27;ve seen people in my family buying often and getting regrets. Now I have developed muscle memory to absolutely not trust any product&#x2F;sign ups on FB.

There&#x27;s another side of the medal. Merchants that are trying to sell anything on Amazon have to have some positive reviews, otherwise their product will not be sold at all, even when the product is great. I guess that here two factors contribute, the product is being outranked by others, which have good reviews, and users not trusting such products.<p>I totally see how in this chicken and egg problem merchants would choose to buy some fake reviews.<p>Now, add the problem of lack of transparency in reviews, i.e. there&#x27;s no record of rejected legitimate reviews, no record of removed reviews; and now you have a dysfunctional system. No one is happy about it, but it degrades both quality of Amazon and trust in it.

On this post, many commentators seem convinced amazon will have issues resulting from lack of trust. Any leading indicators that would bring some credibility to this claim that anyone can share? In general, the HN community seems to be a bit more opinionated (and informed) than the average nonHN reader wrt privacy and other things that get attention in the tech circles. Always looking to understand the difference between HN community and the broader populace.

As a result I never trust five star reviews. I only trusts reviews that has some critism.<p>IMDB is also a site that has gone downhill, filled with fake reviews.

Markets where you can not tell how good a product is simply by reading the technical spec or scientific tests, eg markets where fake reviews will have a strong impact is not a market you want to enter, because everyone is hustling and the price people are willing to pay will keep dropping.

What are some solid sources of product reviews these days, where the reviewers are both competent and unbiased? I will occasionally go to sweethome or wirecutter, but I&#x27;m never sure if I&#x27;m just reading a well hidden PR piece from a sponsor or if this is their actual opinion.

Ive been having a direct experience with follower bots on soundcloud. I&#x27;ll post some weird music, and bots will immediately like or follow. I do not follow them back, so they unlike and unfollow.

I despise Amazon now. Every search returns ads for Chinese fakes and other overpriced fba products. I absolutely love Costco and dream about having Costco prices and impeccable quality with Prime.

I assume modern journalism is just the pursuit of the ability to conflate as many big tech names into one headline as possible. Jackpot for the Guardian here!

Protip: if you find a crap product that&#x27;s being shilled for in the reviews, you can talk your way into getting paid decently for your silence. I know someone who was paid several hundred dollars to not leave a bad review for a something that cost under $50. One scathing review that exposes their scheme might lost them tens, maybe a hundred multiples of their unit profit margin.

This is unrelated comment I know. But i did not found any suuport or FAQ on this site. Can anyone tell me why it&#x27;s saying that I am still a new user so that I can&#x27;t post anything on this site? how much time it will take to aactive my account?

Couldn&#x27;t you post a five star review, get reimbursed, and then change your review to an honest one? Asking for a friend.

Fakespot.com

If this is such an obvious issue in E mercantile capitalism, then it seems an obvious choice for other places that money and power come into play.

Honestly, I&#x27;m shocked that in 2018, anyone believes anything they read in online reviews written by strangers on the Internet. It&#x27;s got to be common knowledge by now that most of them are fake and often paid for, and that some companies manipulate which results you see based on not-quite-above-the-board criteria. Who actually takes these things seriously anymore?