Amazon Sues 10,000 Facebook Groups For Fake Reviews
When it comes to reviews on Amazon and similar shopping sites, most people have by now developed their own approach to dealing with them.
Some use a mixture of instinct and experience to decide if what they read is genuine, while others browse the wide selection to try and get a general idea of a product’s reputation. Of course, some people just ignore them altogether.
The simple fact is that it is extremely difficult to correctly determine whether what we are reading was published by a real buyer or someone who was paid for false praise.
Amazon has been fighting for years to keep bogus reviews off its site, and has invested huge sums of money in automated and human-driven systems to try and keep the situation under control.
The online shopping giant’s latest attack on fake reviews is that it is suing the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups, whom it accuses of running schemes using fake reviews that end up on Amazon.
One of the Facebook groups mentioned in the Amazon lawsuit is called Amazon Product Review. It had over 43,000 members when Facebook-owned Meta removed it from its platform earlier this year. Amazon said the group’s administrators tried to hide their activities and avoid detection by slightly changing the spelling of words in phrases intended to alert AI-based software that is looking for fake reviews.
Amazon said more than 12,000 employees worldwide are working to protect its shopping site from fraud and abuse, including fake reviews.
