Fake online reviews of products a booming industry

Like most people during this pandemic you've probably bought something online from Amazon or used Google to search for a business or service during the past year. And if you did you likely based a decision on what to buy or which business to use on positive reviews.

Some 94 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace sold products worth an estimated $295 billion (€250bn) in 2020. It’s an overwhelmingly vast, sharply competitive virtual shopfront, and getting your product seen is critical to success. Amazon’s algorithm is structured around what buyers think and do, highlighting products that sell and review well.

Yet both of these ranking systems are regularly and seemingly easily manipulated, according to the results of detailed investigations disclosed this month by UK consumer organisation Which?

It says the co-ordinated trade in fake reviews is a huge global business, not least because as buyers have jumped online during the pandemic, so have sellers, making it even harder to get a product noticed. According to Which?, “[in] early 2021 new [Amazon] sellers were joining at a rate of 247 every hour”,

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Which? went to 10 websites that it says offer “review manipulation services” to Amazon sellers, posing either as a potential reviewer or a seller needing reviews. Which? found “a thriving industry” potentially adding millions of misleading reviews on to the platform. Products touting for fake reviews on the review platforms included everything from electronics to dog toys to vegan food items.

Discounted products

Just five of the 10 fake review platforms Which? looked at offered 702,000 product reviewers ready to be hired, most often for reviews exchanged for free or steeply discounted products, though sometimes for cash. Which? believes these numbers likely only hint at the scale of the fake review industry.

Some sites run loyalty schemes where reviewers can earn tokens that boost their ranking as a reviewer to sellers, increasing their chances of being offered premium products.

One site, Rebatest, claims to have 215,000 reviewers, and to have issued $8.9 million in refunds for product reviews on 395,070 products.

On these platforms reviewers browse a range of products, then follow a link to buy it so they appear as a  more legitimate looking “verified buyer” on the review.

Sites sell reviews to sellers for £5 to15 each, and also sell”‘review votes” – if you have used Amazon,you might have noticed you can vote-up reviews as “helpful” – which impacts the default order in which reviews are displayed, boosting the “helpful” reviews.

Which? found one German firm, AMZTigers, boasts of 62,000 global reviewers, with over 20,000 in the UK. It sells individual reviews at £13 each, or bulk review/vote packages ranging from £620 for 50 reviews on up to £8,000 for 1,000 reviews.

Another firm, AMZDiscover, sells contact details for reviewers of a product so that sellers can contact them directly about reviews or poach them from other review sites, which not only is a violation of Amazon’s policy that reviewers use its encrypted email server but also raises data-protection concerns if reviewers are not themselves offering contact details, which can include email, URLs and social media profiles. AMZDiscover claims some seller clients have downloaded over 40,000 reviewer email addresses.

Platforms

An earlier Which? investigation found a similarly highly-organised fake review system run through enormous private Facebook groups.

While buying reviews doesn’t guarantee sales, Which? found examples of products where it seemed it had, with a pair of Enacfire headphones that was being offered for free on review platforms, garnering 21,670 reviews and a 4.4 star rating. Other products offered on review platforms had earned a sales-boosting “Amazon Choice” endorsement.

Meanwhile, another investigation revealed a similarly-gamed system for Google business reviews, “a booming industry in misleading information”, according to Which?.

Which? set up a business – laughingly called Five Star Reviews – and bought 20 Google reviews for $150 from a site called Reviewr. Which? specified it wanted three- to five-star reviews, left over a number of days, and even provided the gushing reviews.

Which? found that many of the same Google accounts posting fake reviews for the Which? fake business also left reviews across dozens of “local” businesses in the UK, some hundreds of miles apart.

Serious gap

Although Google (like Amazon) has policies in place to try to prevent fake reviews, Which? says “the web of reviewers we uncovered reveals a serious gap in Google’s measures to stop abuse of its review platform” .

It points to the potential for serious fraud, noting it uncovered one Canary Wharf-based stockbroker who had buried a collection of starkly negative reviews – including one person claiming significant financial losses – under a plethora of purchased positive reviews.

Both Amazon and Google have told Which? that they take active steps to stop and prevent fake reviews, and argue that there needs to stronger global co-operation and enforcement to deal with this issue.

But Which? rightly states such platforms could and must do more to prevent consumers from being misled, and calls on governments and regulators to require greater accountability if they do not.

For now it concludes that buyers need to “remember that age-old advice – if it looks to good to be true, it probably is”.