[HN Gopher] Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 428 points
Date : 2021-05-07 12:43 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.safetydetectives.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.safetydetectives.com)
| unloco wrote:
| I don't find the fake reviews that important when I make a
| purchase. I know they are there. I know 95% of my Amazon search
| results are absolute trash. You get what you pay for. If you
| don't do your research, and think a $50 speaker from HWAROMA is
| going to be as good as a $250 Celestion because of reviews,
| that's kinda on you. Believe it or not, some people will want
| that deal because that $50 speaker might get them through a show
| in hard times.
|
| You do have to do research on everything you buy. User reviews
| are still a part of that research, just not nearly as much.
|
| If you google info on what you want, you KNOW at least the top 25
| results are all paid for in one way or another, probably more
| than that now.
|
| Don't expect a corporation to watch your back. Amazon has made
| clear they give NO F's about the average human using their
| services, as long as they keep using it.
| welder wrote:
| It's common to receive a counterfeit brand-name product from
| Amazon, because anyone can fulfill a product by sending it to
| an Amazon warehouse. Lot's of counterfeits make it in. Netflix
| even has a docuseries about it[1]. Research doesn't help there,
| since you're getting a counterfeit instead of the quality
| product you researched. Yelp is even worse than Amazon, with
| reviews tied into their business model[2].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMPdsKvhCOo (Netflix's
| Broken about Amazon counterfeits)
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG-ULQrlx9s (Yelp Billion
| Dollar Bully Trailer)
| hsnewman wrote:
| I recently got spam that said that if I purchase a product for
| 1/2 the price (reduced via a link in the email), AND then I put a
| review of the product, they will give me a refund for the 1/2
| price I paid. I reported this to Amazon, and Amazon replied that
| the email was not doing anything wrong. I didn't do this, since
| the commitment to pay back the 1/2 I paid was not guaranteed.
| palae wrote:
| A few years ago, I closed my Amazon account partly because I felt
| like the company was a net negative for society. And I haven't
| missed it, even in the past year. I guess it's kind of similar to
| social media in that respect, you feel less like a
| clicking/buying machine and it's pretty nice.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| The main issue is that all ratings systems are essentially
| mathematical garbage, with voting incentives heavily skewed by
| actors who want to sell or disparage a competitor. The masses are
| the collateral damage. But even in an honest "fair" voting schema
| how does my neighbor harbor the same sort of values and beliefs
| in a product as I do. Just like opinions, ratings are inherently
| subjective and relative to one's own value systems. Some prefer
| cheap, quick and dirty solutions whilst others prefer durable and
| long-term solutions.
| deostroll wrote:
| It's not an Amazon-only issue. Many services, even Google
| playstore, is replete with this kind of _infestation_. There are
| many perspectives here.
|
| (1) One can hope to combat this with technology and processes.
| But the number of people consuming the service versus the actual
| number of people and systems employed to safe guard customer
| trust is quite high.
|
| (2) Understand the kingdom of humanity. There are always good/bad
| actors. The line that divides good/bad is also quite fickle. But
| we need more "good". We need to discuss this more.
| kgodey wrote:
| I reviewed books regularly on Amazon years ago and made it into
| their top 10,000 reviewers list. Ever since then, I regularly get
| emails from Amazon sellers asking me to review their products.
| Before Amazon introduced the "verified purchase" system, they
| would offer to send me the product, now they ask me to buy their
| product and they'll refund me on PayPal.
|
| I still get a few emails every week, even though it's been years
| since I reviewed anything and I'm now reviewer #1,263,485.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| There's a top 10,000 reviewers list? That sounds like a problem
| to me. It should be called top 10,000 users to bribe for
| reviews.
| kgodey wrote:
| Yup, here it is: https://www.amazon.com/review/top-reviewers.
|
| Edited to add: I think it takes into account how many people
| vote your reviews as helpful. I got a lot of helpful votes
| because I received books weeks or months before they were
| released (I had a book review blog) and would post reviews on
| the release date so they would be one of the first reviews
| up.
| weasel_words wrote:
| I wouldn't think this even possible?!? 24k+ reviews!
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AENQAO4BXMO
| 7...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| To me that proves Amazon entices and enables this fake
| review bs. They give fraudsters everything they need
| without explicitly saying it.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Skimming a hundred or so reviews from first few of the
| 10,000, every review is five stars, posted at rates of ten or
| more per week.
|
| So to the fakery professionals, it's an industry leaderboard.
|
| To you and me, who have need to spot fake reviews, it's a
| singularly valuable sample of what to be on guard against. So
| thanks, Amazon, for clueing us in to just how rotten your
| system really is!
| Rohpakle wrote:
| I never read the positive reviews anymore.
|
| I mostly scan the negatives to see if there's any consistent
| issues. If they are only "shipping got damaged" or something
| clearly that the manufacturer warned against and the buyer still
| bought it..."this was too small or big" kind of thing (measure
| before you order, people)...I'm good to go.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I think it is easy to be cynical and easier still to say, "Just
| fix it, nerd," but trying to detect collusion between two parties
| when you do not control their communications is quite difficult,
| especially when their associations will be only fleeting.
|
| For example, you _could_ disallow changes in star ratings, but
| that would also prevent people from rating something only to
| change their minds when it broke three months later and you 've
| lost useful information that way.
|
| You _could_ make sure all communication goes through Amazon, but
| that only counts for email. The seller has your physical address
| and therefore can offer you gift cards to change your mind, via a
| postal offer.
|
| You _could_ hide the names of reviewers, but then you risk losing
| the trust metagame where there are reviewers people trust.
|
| You _could_ allow only the verified purchaser of a product to
| comment, and only once, and that makes "review bombing" of
| competitors expensive but not impossible.
|
| I imagine you would need a good outline of all types of different
| "fakes" (I am sure multiple sorts exist) and scams, then find the
| nastiest game theorists available and discuss what could and
| could not be done. The more I think about this, the more Amazon
| Marketplace morphs into Amazon Escrow.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| As someone that helps clients with their Amazon stores, this is
| not a surprise, what is the surprise is that so few people know
| about. Review scamming has been an issue on Amazon for a very
| long time and each time that Amazon rolls out a new method of
| combating it the review sellers simply pivot and keep right on
| rolling.
|
| The hardest part for a lot of smaller sellers is that with enough
| negative reviews you can have your account locked or even
| cancelled and there is nothing (not much) you can do about it,
| just like dealing with a Google or Facebook lockout. There is no
| recourse for most people.
| [deleted]
| toss1 wrote:
| This is good to see hard evidence of a scam that has for many
| years been obvious to anyone who bothered to look -- Amazon
| reviews in any non-obscure category have been fake for years, and
| there are multiple startups/services working to mitigate it,
| e.g., Fakespot [1], which are definitely helpful.
|
| Now we get to see if Amazon is actually just really bad at
| filtering a bad problem, or really just DGAF as long as the fraud
| drives sales and commissions.
|
| What we should see is wholesale delisting, banning, and
| prosecution of vendors, and banning and selected prosecution of
| fakers. What will we actually see?
|
| I'd think Amazon would care when people abandon them because it
| is just too hard to find anything real, but the level of fraud on
| there indicates that Amazon prioritizes other metrics. When a few
| figure it out, it doesn't hit the traffic & sales numbers much.
| When many figure it out, it is likely too late. Did Bezos exit
| while the exiting was still good?
|
| [1] https://www.fakespot.com/
| chenster wrote:
| Alizon
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > The server contained a treasure trove of direct messages
| between Amazon vendors and customers willing to provide fake
| reviews in exchange for free products. In total, 13,124,962 of
| these records (or 7 GB of data) have been exposed in the breach,
| potentially implicating more than 200,000 people in unethical
| activities.
|
| This information should be made public.
|
| I'd love a browser plug-in which displays a warning when viewing
| a product from a vendor in this database, that the vendor has
| been known to pay for reviews, and likewise if viewing a review
| by someone in this database, a warning that the reviewer is a
| shill.
| xfz wrote:
| Yeah, Amazon reviews are pretty broken.
|
| Not sure if this helps much, but I try to avoid buying from
| marketplace sellers. This is partly to avoid my personal data
| being shared with yet another company (it's been misused by
| marketplace sellers in the past) but also in the theory (hope!)
| that Amazon themselves will on average buy better products. After
| all, they have their reputation to maintain and have to deal with
| all the refunds if they sell shoddy goods.
|
| Increasingly though, I'd rather just shop from a retailer that
| specialises in a particular type of product and has invested in
| their reputation.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| I'm with you here. I only buy from Amazon itself, or, if
| looking for a specific item (eg. a known brand, or a product
| with 'offical' reviews found elsewhere), the manufacturer's. It
| probably reduces the risk of fake/knockoff/garbage products. I
| also feel (not sure about that, though) that the customer
| support would be better should there be any issue with the
| delivery or the product.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| I bought something on Amazon for $20, the seller then sent me a
| post card offering a $25 Amazon gift card for providing proof of
| a 5-star review.
| dynm wrote:
| I've always wondered why Amazon didn't take a "collaborative
| filtering" approach to reviews -- basically take your ratings and
| then give you recommendations based on others who tend to give
| similar ratings. It seems like this would mean that the scammers
| would mostly just give their nonsense reviews to other scammers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "Was this review helpful to you?" Maybe there should be a
| concerted effort of "people" to start clicking "No" to that
| question on obvious fake reviews. There's already sites
| tracking bad reviews, so "borrow" their list, create some bots,
| and start negating fake reviews. ??
| naresh_xai wrote:
| Companies list/re-list products on amazon faster than you can
| say 'go' unfortunately.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is one thing that I think YouTube gets right. Once a
| video has been posted and comments have been posted, liked,
| etc, you cannot change that video in any form. This is on
| the premise of avoid bait-n-switch to put of a video to
| garner the positive response and then swapping it out with
| a different video. Amazon should do something similar.
| gowld wrote:
| It's a lot harder. Google makes all the copies of a
| video. Amazon doesn't make all the copies of a product.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I don't thunk that would work with physical objects very
| well. Especially when recalls are done via serial number.
| Apparent identical physical objects are always
| fundamentally different from each other unlike data.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Just like movie recommendations. "Other people like you gave
| this 4 stars".
|
| Combine that with a lot of machine learning and you could
| probably get a very accurate way to judge which products will
| delight which customers.
|
| I wonder - could a third party do this? Amazon reviews could
| all be scraped...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It would be sucky in the same way "Hey you bought a new washing
| machine. Here is this new washing machine for sale!"
| recommended items often are.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| How do (relatively) smaller marketplaces avoid these problems?
| ex: steam allows reviews from people who got the product for
| free, and all the reviews tend to be far more trustworthy IMO,
| both in detail and aggregate. Is this because the economics of
| the market's products is different (plus easy to refund)?
| artful-hacker wrote:
| At least for me the best part of Steam reviews is that I can
| easily check reviews done by my friends / online gamer groups.
| By restricting the web of trust so a smaller batch of entities,
| I know I am avoiding most of the fraudsters.
| varispeed wrote:
| I wish by law Amazon (and other stores) were forced to show
| country of origin of the products. Last week I needed to buy a
| new kettle and this was a nightmare to find a product that is not
| made in China (for ethical reasons). It should be as easy as
| selecting a country you want a product from - instead you have to
| go through each individual listing, look through photos or
| answers. Sometimes it is easy to find where product is made by
| just looking at description (e.g. broken English), but some
| sellers go out of their way to mask where things are made. As a
| consumer I should be able to filter products I don't want more
| easily. Then when you order a product you get these cards that
| say if you leave a positive review, you'll get a discount or free
| product. If you leave a negative review, you can brace yourself
| for being bombarded by Chinese companies threatening you in
| various ways to delete the review. Amazon needs to sort this out
| and if they cannot do it, regulator should step in.
|
| edit: here we go again, something negative about China and
| commment is being downvoted. Can Hacker News do something about
| Chinese bots?
| simion314 wrote:
| You could have been downvoted by "true americans" that hate any
| kind of regulation and think that free market solves anything.
|
| IMO regulation for more transparency should be no issue with
| the anti-regulation fans except if they would be affected by
| transparency.
| ticviking wrote:
| Transparency is a kind of regulation though. One that I think
| we sorely need. Along side anti-basic anti-trust and some
| small protective tariffs for countries that don't have good
| labor standards.
|
| Much of the cost of stuff made in the first world is the cost
| of having a first world regulatory framework and workplace
| protections.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Transparency is a kind of regulation though.
|
| Sure, and the anti-regulation or anti-tax guys still demand
| that police protect their money and goods - so I can't
| understand when the anti-regulation fanatic is saying that
| free market will eventually solve this , transparency is
| too much of a burden or danger.
| barbazoo wrote:
| There seem to be laws around having to put the "made in ..." on
| the product itself, it shouldn't be hard to put that on the
| online product description as well. I'd be for that. It's not
| an anti-[any country] thing, I'd just prefer things that are
| made close to where I am.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Made in x is a fundamentally misleading metric with anything
| of complex supply chains and international trades. Thanks to
| old pissing matches there is tarrif induced inefficient
| stupidity of "almost finished goods" which are shipped and
| then "manufactured" by doing token last steps domestically
| just for tarrif avoidance.
| Y_Y wrote:
| So you won't boil water in a Chinese kettle, yet you happily
| collect tons of downvotes from best-in-class Chinese votebots?
| Pick a lane!
| insickness wrote:
| Last year, I posted a negative review of an inexpensive (~$10)
| electronic device on Amazon. A few weeks later, the seller
| contacted me with an offer of a $20 Amazon gift certificate to
| take it down. I didn't respond. A few days later, they offered
| $30, then $40, then $50.
| zanmat0 wrote:
| You should take their offer and repost your review a week
| later, including some information about their bribery.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Those get taken down, with the motivation that they're
| reviewing the seller, not the product, and should be on the
| seller's page instead (where no one reads them).
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| That's funny, you can make a business out of "leave bad reviews
| and don't respond to the first offer to change it" =)
| shoefindortz wrote:
| I've also received around ~10 of these same emails offering
| increasing prices to remove my review.
|
| Maybe this is a good investment opportunity? I'm joking, but
| they did offer me almost twice the price of the product itself,
| which is interesting.
|
| Something also curious is that the seller initially sent emails
| starting with with "Hi, [my sister's name]". Her name was not
| associated with my amazon account at all, and definitely not
| the name shown on the amazon review. I wonder where they are
| retrieving the names from for this.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Address info, maybe? That's creepy, I hope you reported it.
| yalogin wrote:
| How is the seller able to contact you? I mean why is the site
| allowing them access to your contact info?
| gowld wrote:
| You don't need "the site" to find info for someone whose name
| and mailing address you know.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I was offered a 50% refund for a terrible action camera. I took
| it (I'd relegated the camera to monitoring my greenhouse, so it
| was worth keeping at 50% off for that purpose), and they began
| reminding me to correct my bad review every few days. It
| started out with typical broken English telling me they were
| grateful for the opportunity to serve me and resolve my bad
| review, please go set the review to 5 stars.
|
| Now I get messages asking me to please fix the review because
| they will get in trouble for refunding me and not getting a 5
| star review, and they thought we had a deal. Sort of coercive,
| urgent language.
|
| So creepy and obnoxious.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Your lucky. The last two times I tried to post a review on
| Amazon, Amazon declined the review under some pretense or
| another.
|
| I've stopped writing reviews on Amazon. Apparently you can't
| talk trash about a product you were unhappy with....
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I have to say that in retrospect, it seems fairly pathetic that
| back in 94-95 we (Jeff, Shel and myself) did not even think about
| how the review system would eventually get gamed with this level
| of "sophistication".
|
| I think if you had told us then that this sort of thing would
| eventually happen, we would not have believed you. This goes to
| show, perhaps, that imagining the significance of something when
| you're first building it is almost impossible. The notion that
| worldwide manufacturers and distributors would consider it so
| important to have "strong" amazon reviews that they would engage
| in this kind of behavior just would not have crossed our minds
| back when amazon itself had no significance.
|
| So if you're building something right now, maybe stop and ask
| yourself "ok, so how does this all look if we end up taking over
| the world 25 years from now, and this thing is a gatekeeper
| between a lot of people and a lot of revenue?"
| ej12n wrote:
| >So if you're building something right now, maybe stop and ask
| yourself "ok, so how does this all look if we end up taking
| over the world 25 years from now, and this thing is a
| gatekeeper between a lot of people and a lot of revenue?"
|
| This is a fair concern, but I'd say that if you're building
| something right now, I _think_ is better to worry more about
| getting your startup in a position to take over the world first
| and then deal with those concerns. Worrying about these big
| problems when you 're small I would say is a bit of premature
| optimization.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If we had known in 94 that customer reviews would eventually
| get gamed in this way, should we ever have added the feature?
| Was 15 or 20 (?) years of a "working" review system enough to
| make it worthwhile, and now it needs revisiting, or should we
| just have said "no" right at the start?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| No review system would be even worse as you cannot even
| tell if people are getting crap. There is already
| ceasesless whining about false positives being an abuse of
| power and in the same breath complaining about not doing
| enough.
|
| The "do nothing ever without the foresight of a precog or
| else you are EVIL!" school of ethics never made any sense.
| It is just an excuse to be outraged and pin all of the
| world's problems on the tall poppy.
| ashleshbiradar wrote:
| I once bought a product from Amazon India, the manufacturer had
| literally printed on the product, that if I give a 5 star review
| and send a screenshot on Whatsapp they'd give me X cashback. I
| outed them on amazon reviews, and amazon decided to not publish
| my review.
| system16 wrote:
| It's gotten to the point where a product with thousands of
| reviews and an average 4.5 - 5 star rating immediately raises a
| red flag with me.
|
| And Amazon appears unmotivated to do anything about it. As a
| personal example, I had purchased a mouth guard that had over six
| thousand 5-star reviews. It was listed as high quality, FDA
| approved, etc. When I received it, it was a piece of plastic junk
| with inkjet quality instructions in English and Chinese. Along
| with it came a note promising a $10 Amazon gift card if I left a
| 5 star review and emailed them proof of it.
|
| I took a photo of the note and forwarded it to Amazon expecting
| some action - instead I received a canned response about "we take
| these issues seriously". A year later, that seller is still there
| with dozens of products, all with thousands of 5-star reviews.
| randompwd wrote:
| I did the same with Amazon UK. Free gift card for review for a
| very broken product and Amazons response was that they couldnt
| publish the review!
| asddubs wrote:
| yup, had the exact same experience with a different product
| before. amazon does not care
| jareklupinski wrote:
| I canceled my prime subscription right after receiving
| something similar
|
| It's just not worth it anymore to buy something on Amazon only
| to receive a counterfeit and then have to order the same thing
| directly from the manufacturer anyway; something something poor
| man pays twice
| bassdropvroom wrote:
| I've started putting these pictures in a review and then give
| an honest review. This will allow people to decide what to
| think of all the reviews, including mine, and whether or not
| they're willing to accept the risk.
| [deleted]
| varispeed wrote:
| I don't think most of products they sell are actually legal to
| be sold. If you had these products in your mom and pops shop,
| the trading standards or whatever agency would shut down your
| store, but somehow Amazon is allowed to sell all this dangerous
| junk without consequences and they are even allowed to avoid
| paying tax. Something isn't right.
| ticviking wrote:
| It's called corruption. Or regulatory capture if we are
| trying not to ruffle feathers.
|
| Part of the issue we all keep buying this junk and reporting
| it to Amazon instead of the police, ftc and other enforcement
| bodies
| varispeed wrote:
| I tried to report something once and agency told me to take
| it with Amazon, so there you go...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've reported plenty of counterfeits to my state's AG and
| consumer protection division. They have an easy online form
| these days.
| gowld wrote:
| Did you get results?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've had a follow up for more information about a
| specific incident, but I haven't been contacted with
| concrete results of my reports.
|
| I figure, if anything, my reports might influence
| investigations or prosecutions later down the line, along
| with evidence and reports gathered by others. I don't
| really expect anyone to reach out to me unless they want
| my testimony, and at that point, I'm sure there are
| better people they could drag into hearings or court.
| jcadam wrote:
| Aw, man. Here I am working my ass off for The Man when such an
| easy, obvious, and apparently unchallenged grift is just right
| there in front of my face:
|
| 1. Find some cheap-ass white-label product and order a crap-ton
| of it.
|
| 2. List on amazon for a nice markup
|
| 3. Bribe idiots to leave 5 star reviews.
| adamhp wrote:
| There are actually a lot of people doing this. It's the next
| "buy a carwash" or "buy a laundromat".
| fma wrote:
| There is a whole industry around this...and I'd say you (and
| I) were many years too late. Once you find a good product
| others will come for it. If I find something "cool" on Amazon
| I check Aliexpress. If it's a significant savings I'd just
| buy it from there.
| catillac wrote:
| For what it's worth, and a little off topic, I would never ever
| purchase a product that went in or closely on my body from
| Amazon. Jacket? Maybe. Food? Not likely. Mouth guard that sits
| in my mouth for hours every night? Absolutely not, no, ever.
|
| Too many fake products that look like they're the real things,
| and if they're fake who knows where they come from or what
| they're made of.
| wombat-man wrote:
| yeah, it's fucked up that it's come to this but I'm the same
| way. I don't even really care about reviews anymore on
| amazon. I just don't believe the star rating.
|
| Reviews with pictures seem better, or like reddit reviews if
| it's a brand name.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Reminds me of the nightmare that descended on Steam when they
| opened up Greenlight to nearly everyone. Great in theory, but in
| short order the service was drowning in low effort garbage, asset
| flips and downright scams. Eventually they had to up the barrier
| of entry a little again just to get some sanity back. Or just
| look at the wasteland that is the Play Store on Android. Any
| marketplace that's globally accessible needs to have curation and
| a high barrier of entry, or it will be spammed to death by these
| people. Of course, Amazon has no motivation to fix this, being a
| monopoly. They get paid either way.
| yalogin wrote:
| I have always wondered why "verified purchase" is a thing. That
| should be the default and only way to review. May be when they
| were little it was needed, but now they already know who is
| adding the review, they can easily check if the user bought that
| item in the last X months and only allow in that case. The rest
| of them can't add reviews, simple.
| ericabiz wrote:
| All of these would be "verified purchase" reviews. The scammy
| seller refunds you through PayPal after you post the review.
| pupppet wrote:
| Basically every Amazon product has a 4.5 star average rating now,
| the reviews are useless.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Unverified claims are useless*
|
| Reviews are largely unverified claims with financial
| incentives. You bet they're useless.
| ziptron wrote:
| "Fraudulent reviewers with thousands of fake reviews to their
| name can pay penalties of more than $10,000, and could even
| receive a jail sentence. "
|
| Is there actually a law in the US (or others) that suggests
| leaving fake reviews could subject you to a $10,000 fine and/or
| jail time?
|
| Asking for a friend.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I hope Fakespot gets to integrate this leak in their dataset!
| bagacrap wrote:
| or at least use it as training data
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Often it's quite easy to spot these fake reviews. I mean a 10 $
| USB-C cable with more Amazon reviews than e.g. the PS5? Sure. The
| popular "name brands" must really like this as these scammers
| ruin the collaborative review system for everyone, so people will
| put more trust in brand names again.
|
| Another funny thing are all the new brands that pop up on Amazon
| (at least in Germany). They're often picked to sound vaguely
| familiar (e.g. Orfeld) and trust-inspiring, and their product
| pages portrait them as century-old companies. Often the products
| they sell are sourced from whitelabel manufacturers, so you have
| 20-40 brands offering the same product (for wildly different
| prices), maybe with some small variation in packaging and color.
|
| Interestingly, some new companies like Anker have managed to
| build up a good "brand reputation" in 5-10 years, probably also
| due to the fact that they're no longer at the bottom of the trust
| chain.
| jader201 wrote:
| > I mean a 10 $ USB-C cable with more Amazon reviews than e.g.
| the PS5?
|
| That seems like a bad example. People are having a really hard
| time getting PS5s, and probably 50%+ are scalpers that don't
| care about writing reviews. And cables are produced and bought
| at a much higher rate than video game consoles, anyway.
| 1_person wrote:
| The funny thing to me, if you think about it, is that nothing
| really changed, it's just become more transparent.
|
| It's for decades, if not arguably always been a bunch of
| bullshit marketing for meaningless labels slapped on imported
| knock offs of questionable quality that you just hope they
| sample enough of for QA to keep the factory from slipping turds
| and razor blades into some of the boxes.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Cables are an interesting example because they are so
| inexpensive and easy to produce, I can't imagine any one being
| much better than the others. Especially when they're all within
| 10-20% in price.
|
| I used to agonize over finding "the best" but then I started to
| realize how much time I was wasting. Just find the cheapest
| option with the length you want and call it a day. Same goes
| for most things on Amazon.
| blakesterz wrote:
| Wow, the scale of this surprised me. Made me wonder, do these
| services offer both positive and negative reviews? That is, if I
| want, can I get 5 stars on my stuff, and then also pay for 1 star
| on my competition?
|
| "In total, 13,124,962 of these records (or 7 GB of data) have
| been exposed in the breach, potentially implicating more than
| 200,000 people in unethical activities."
| mkmk wrote:
| Sometimes even the threat of negative reviews is used as a
| method of extortion against competitive sellers.
| milofeynman wrote:
| As others have said before, going to Amazon and reading 1-2 star
| reviews is the best way to judge I have found.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Why Amazon allow people that did not purchase the product to
| review it? Does not make any sense.
| coldcode wrote:
| If you read the article, they made deals to have people buy the
| product, give it 5 stars, and then reimbursed the buyer who got
| to keep the product.
| neuronic wrote:
| The same review scam issues exist anywhere where reviews are a
| thing. imdb, yelp, google...
|
| Anecdote: just before the pandemic me and my SO searched for a
| Sushi place one day. Found one on Google, 4.7 star average on
| 500ish reviews. Should be good, right?
|
| Nope. It was literally the worst restaurant experience of my
| life. Nobody was inside. Weird location. The menu screamed "run
| by cheap assholes trying to scam you". It's always a huge red
| flag when well over 100 menu items exist and all are from
| different Asian cuisines (BUT authentic Chinese restaurants will
| still be amazing despite 700+ items).
|
| Hungry, we still sat down and ate and dear god was it bad. I will
| spare you details. Some weird Indian dude pretended to service
| us, food was worse than gas station sushi.
|
| So what happened? We made the mistake to just look at the summed
| score and not the reviews. It were obvious paid Indian reviews
| and bots. So obvious that I was angry at myself for the stupidity
| not to check more closely and angry at Google to allow such
| bullshit on their platform.
| RootReducer wrote:
| Why does it matter that the server was Indian?
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| Another feature of the interaction that did not match OP's
| priors.
| acrobatsunfish wrote:
| It must be tiring to jump at shadows of racism all the time.
| He mentioned it because that's what he was. You can't get any
| more generic of a description then someone's gender and race.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| It's usually not necessary to mention someone's race.
| Nothing objective is added here because we know the server
| is Indian. The author is expecting the information to carry
| specific negative connotations with the reader, and just to
| make sure he adds that the server was "weird".
|
| He doubles down on making sure you understand that Indian =
| dishonest by mentioning fake reviews, that were surely
| created by Indians. Maybe they were, but that is not
| materially important to the situation. Fake reviews can
| just as easily be created by Americans, or Japanese, or
| literally anyone on Earth.
|
| I understand that people like you tire of hearing your
| thoughts and ideas challenged. It's part of the reason the
| world is becoming more polarized. People would rather stick
| their fingers in their ears and say everything is okay,
| rather than face the problems that exist in society. I hope
| you remove the fingers some day.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| How exactly is mentioning that someone is Indian the same
| as disparaging Indian people and equating them to 'bad'.
| Why exactly does it matter if it matters if he's Indian.
| Why is race suddenly not okay as a descriptor in any
| scenario. Or would it have been totally fine if it had
| been an amazing experience and a "nice Indian man". Would
| that be equating Indian = good and thus also disingenuous
| and harmful because bad people exist?
|
| If he was directly insinuating that Indians are bad then
| I'd agree with you. Being Indian is simply a
| supplementary detail to the story. It didn't have to be
| Indian, didn't have to be a sushi restaurant, didn't have
| to be Google for reviews. Does mentioning a sushi
| restaurant make it insinuating that sushi restaurant =
| bad and thus not okay. What details are okay and what are
| not. If it's just the race then what makes his race in a
| totally different category to all other descriptors used
| in the description. Please be specific
| jonfw wrote:
| 'server' is significantly more generic than 'weird indian
| dude'
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| It doesn't. This guy seems to have a problem with Indians,
| giving he mentioned the term twice when it wasn't necessary,
| and maybe not even accurate.
|
| My guess would be part of his negative experience was on him
| being a negative person.
| abandonliberty wrote:
| You could probably answer this question yourself, but it
| seems like you prefer to accuse the poster of racism.
|
| How many times have you been served by an Indian in a sushi
| restaurant?
| jwally wrote:
| Dumb question: if you un-tethered reviews to user profiles (or
| removed user profiles all together), wouldn't this problem go
| away, or fall drastically?
|
| If amazon could give me the scores from verified-purchasers, show
| me anonymized comments from verified-purchasers; I think I'd be
| ok.
| achenatx wrote:
| I use 5* ratings to get an idea of which products to look at, but
| I mainly look at 1-3* reviews to see if I want to buy it.
|
| I personally had a ton of amazon basics batteries leak in the
| packaging after 2 years of storage. I posted that review and
| amazon rejected it saying it didnt meet their community
| guidelines.
|
| That made me distrust the review process and now I generally wont
| buy amazon branded products. However if there are bad reviews
| that tell the same consistent story and that go into enough
| detail, then they are likely not competitor plants.
| nucleardog wrote:
| > I use 5* ratings to get an idea of which products to look at,
| but I mainly look at 1-3* reviews to see if I want to buy it.
|
| Yep, exactly this.
|
| Who cares what people that were happy with it think, generally.
| Hearing a few use cases is helpful to decide if it's fit for
| what you're trying to do, but it's generally very useful
| information. If I buy this I don't care all the ways it will
| make trees greener and shiny things shinier, I want to know if
| I give them $100 what is the _worst_ experience I will get.
|
| Look at the negative reviews and see what kinds of issues
| people were having. Usually after skimming 5 or 10 you can get
| a pretty good feel for what kind of experience you are going to
| have.
|
| > "These headphones that say 'for iPhone' and clearly show a
| lightning connector don't work with my Android! They should
| really say they don't work with Android! Garbage!"
|
| > "I tried to use this blender to start my own 'will it blend'
| YouTube channel and when I put rocks in the blade got all
| chewed up and the company won't replace it! COMPANY DOESN'T
| STAND BEHIND THEIR PRODUCTS! AVOID!"
|
| > "These $0.50 pens aren't half as good as my co-worker's $80
| pen. Why bother."
|
| > "Said it would get here Friday but it got here Monday, and
| UPS threw it over my fence and broke it!"
|
| > "Ordered this desk chair and parts were missing!"
|
| When the negative reviews are largely stuff like that (bought
| wrong thing, misuse of product, not understanding that cheap
| things are cheap for a reason, carrier issues), you know you
| can basically ignore them. The last one (product issues) kinda
| depends on whether there's a million of these, but generally if
| it's one or two and they don't say that they've tried to
| contact the company to resolve it I'm not too bothered.
|
| When you start seeing reviews that explain (1) an actual issue
| with the product; (2) attempts to contact the company and/or
| get a refund; and (3) a poor response from the company...
| that's when I get worried. A few like:
|
| > "Product arrived, of the ten included, only 4 worked. I
| contacted the seller and two weeks later they still haven't
| responded."
|
| > "Product is very cheaply made. The first one worked for a
| week then the foo broke. The seller sent me a replacement, but
| then that one broke 2 days later."
|
| And I start to look for something else.
| geocrasher wrote:
| It's nice to see hard evidence of this, but anecdotal evidence is
| plain to see on Amazon.com reviews. For example, a product gets a
| lot of 5 star reviews stating that the buyer bought it for their
| child/relative/friend and they are just _sure_ that they will
| love it... 5 stars! Or "I just got this delivered yesterday and
| I haven't used it yet but it looks really great!"... 5 stars.
|
| These are then immediately followed by a 1 star review along the
| lines of "This is the biggest piece of junk I've ever bought
| online. Will be returning to Amazon. DO NOT BUY!"
|
| These aren't to be confused with the indiscriminate idiots who
| can't be bothered to use their brains, who leave mindless reviews
| such as "This is junk but it was cheap and kinda works... 5
| stars!" Right.
|
| Most times this trend of 5's followed by 1's is seen even in the
| first page of reviews. It's a serious problem with the platform.
| I usually search for reviews written by people who have had the
| product for a week or two and give the pros/cons along with a
| less than 5 star rating. That helps me avoid the fakes _and_ the
| idiots.
|
| This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius,
| isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious.
| austinshea wrote:
| It's weird to see you gloss over the only interesting detail in
| this story, the hard evidence,
|
| and then deep dive into conjecture, and your feelings.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical
| genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly
| obvious.
|
| Because there are absolutely no consequences, and general
| boosterism increases sales. If you go to site X and there are a
| mix of good and bad reviews for a product, but then go to
| Amazon and see all good reviews a similar product, you buy at
| Amazon. Especially if you have Prime, which you might just have
| because you like a tv show.
|
| If a systematic fraud is exposed, accounts are banned, Amazon
| press-releases a "crackdown", new accounts are quietly created
| by new business entities owned by the same people, process
| continues. What's the cost?
| ccn0p wrote:
| Yes this. Even worse I've noticed these new business entities
| are getting even better at pretending to be real businesses
| with websites, contact forms, pictures of buildings, and
| "about us" pages written in pretty poor english. I just
| searched for hose the other day and the first few pages of
| brands were: amayrose, JOOIKOS, Zalotte, Amazon Basics,
| Hooshing, FOXEASE, HAUEA, Knoikos, TUNHUI, POYINRO, HIYUTOY.
|
| The second one gets caught for fake reviews, just put the
| name through another random generator and back up.
|
| Trust is eroding, but every time we try and use an Amazon
| competitor we come crawling back. When do viable alternatives
| emerge?
| jfim wrote:
| > Trust is eroding, but every time we try and use an Amazon
| competitor we come crawling back. When do viable
| alternatives emerge?
|
| Out of curiosity, why do you come back to Amazon? Is it the
| delivery speed, price, or something else?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Disagree. Amazon's reviews were the reason I would buy
| online, wait several days, vs. driving home from Best Buy
| with a new TV.
|
| I remember even walking into a brick and mortar store,
| confused because I had no way to judge, for example, one rice
| cooker against another.
|
| As the reliability of Amazon's reviews has waned, so has my
| loyalty.
|
| If I'm just rolling the dice now, I might as well roll the
| dice on eBay or aliexpress.....
| gccs wrote:
| When you roll the dice on amazon, you can return it if you
| don't like it. Its harder to do that on ebay, and
| impossible to do on aliexpress.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, easy returns are a big benefit, and keep me from
| completely abandoning Amazon, for now.
|
| However, for some categories, such as batteries or
| electronics, even after examining all the negative
| reviews and rates, I've found it impossible to get non-
| counterfeit products. I'm happy to go to a regional
| specialist in such items or even to a big-box store just
| to get greater confidence in a genuine item.
|
| (&yes, don't even think about getting 18650s on Amazon. I
| saw someone selling boxes with a Tesla logo & brand -
| obvious BS. I reported it and at least did see them
| disappear in a week, but another popped up.)
| grumpyautist wrote:
| Ilumn has been my go to for 18650s for years
| [deleted]
| dwighttk wrote:
| Keep pumping that well if you want but it is going to dry
| up.
| goodpoint wrote:
| A lot of stuff on aliexpress is 2x, 3x or 4x times
| cheaper than amazon, so the tradeoffs are complex...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've made many returns on AliExpress. I haven't even
| needed to ship the items back to get a refund.
|
| Amazon will eventually drop you as a customer if you make
| it a regular thing to file returns.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I have regularly purchased multiple items on Amazon with
| the intent of sending back my least preferred option for
| about 3 years now. I had the occasional return before
| that as well.
| bluGill wrote:
| I keep thinking I need to subscribe to consumer reports.
| They seem to be the only reviewers these days that I can be
| sure are not bought. They might or might not know what they
| are talking about, but at least they are not bought.
| achenatx wrote:
| single reviews are fine for product features but not
| really about all the ways a product can fail. This
| becomes statistical in nature and a single reviewer wont
| necessarily find those issues.
|
| I find amazon reviews are still fine. Read the worst
| reviews read 3* reviews to find all the worst things. Use
| 5* reviews to get an idea.
| davidhowlett wrote:
| I spent years worrying about misleading descriptions and
| fake reviews. I then bought a subscription to which.co.uk
| and have been a happy customer since. They review a wide
| variety of products and they are a non-profit registered
| as a charity in the UK. They are mainly funded by
| consumer subscriptions so conflicts of interest are
| avoided.
| Dayshine wrote:
| How do you justify the PS100/year?
|
| Which's primary benefit seems to be for White goods, but
| how often do you buy a new fridge/oven/etc?
| ct0 wrote:
| I have to agree with this sentiment. In general, I look for
| long term use reviews, any sign that a product will fail
| both beyond the return period and warranty period.
|
| If my trust in long term reviews erode, I'm inclined to buy
| less.
|
| Word of mount is a powerful tool that amazon has harnessed
| with reviews, and has seemingly replaced the need to see a
| product in person before a purchase.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You are a money losing customer, as you'll return stuff you
| don't like. They would rather have you cost BestBuy money.
|
| There's weird psychological aspects with this. People want
| to buy 5 star product.
| milesvp wrote:
| I worked in a big box retailer a couple decades ago. They
| had metrics that showed them every time a customer
| entered the store it was worth $50. This created a huge
| incentive to handle returns, since just being in the
| store "made them money" even if they walked out of the
| store without buying anything.
|
| I don't know how well this translates to best buy, since
| they probably don't have the same really large purchases
| skewing the average up, but I'm positive returns are a
| net positive for them using similar metrics.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| I paid for college working at a big box store 20 hours a
| week in the 90s, about 50% of commissions were trolling
| the return line and selling to those folks.
|
| For Amazon, I don't think it's that way... you mail them
| a return and they don't cross-sell, many times they scrap
| and sell by the pound.
| baccheion wrote:
| They do have some basic algorithm that weighs each
| review/reviewer. The average shown isn't a raw one. Some
| reviews count more than others. Then add in fakespot.com..
| bstar77 wrote:
| A product that has lots of reviews shows customer engagement
| and Amazon knows this. I'm certain those products get tons
| more sales because people naturally gravitate to what's
| popular. I just bought a small storage cabinet that had no
| reviews and no customer data on it. I hate to say it, but I'd
| probably be a bit more comfortable if there were tons of fake
| reviews as illogical as that sounds, but this particular one
| was the exact size I needed.
|
| I'm also the kind of person that goes straight to the 2-3
| star reviews. I want to know the issues and determine if it's
| just sour grapes (damaged on delivery) or something I should
| be concerned about. When I was browsing step up converters, I
| found some amazing reviews at the 2* levels... like engineers
| that picked the product apart and determined they were wired
| wrong and might be a fire hazard. Sadly these types of
| reviews get buried and often ignored by the worthless deluge
| of 5* reviews.
| r00fus wrote:
| Amazon has billions of dollars in profits. That they don't
| spend a small portion of this on curating their seller base
| tells me they see the fraud as something that helps them.
|
| Or that Amazon can't move beyond their startup mentality of
| growth uber alles. Perhaps the best move at this point is not
| to continue their existing approach, and redefine their
| storefront to something other than a nicer Aliexpress.
| shagie wrote:
| > These aren't to be confused with the indiscriminate idiots
| who can't be bothered to use their brains, who leave mindless
| reviews such as "This is junk but it was cheap and kinda
| works... 5 stars!" Right.
|
| I wouldn't say that they were indiscriminate nor not bothered
| to use their brains. One of the all too often seen things is a
| card for "leave a 5 star review and get a $10 amazon gift card"
| in the package.
|
| Yes, its part of an effort to get 5 star reviews since the
| sorting of the product on amazon is more important than the
| text in the reviews below the fold. Yes, that's unscrupulous on
| both the buyer's and the seller's part.
|
| But it is not indiscriminate or brainless on the part of the
| reviewer. It's selfish.
| geocrasher wrote:
| True, but "Selfish indiscriminate idiots" just doesn't have
| the same ring to it ;-)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And yet! And yet, like Google, Amazon now prefixes my search
| results with "Amazon's Choice" or some other marketing crap.
|
| Man, I remember when you could trust reviews, search for an
| item, filter anything below 4 stars and get a decent,
| reliable list of products to choose from. You felt like you
| had some of the best damn kitchen knives your budget could
| afford.
| dazc wrote:
| 'This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical
| genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly
| obvious.'
|
| Cynically, turn a blind-eye to misdemeanours of third-party
| sellers so long as there is data to be mined. Gradually
| replicate best-selling merchandise through your own-brand
| labels and then slowly dispose of the third-party sellers
| whilst retaining evidence of how they were systematically
| breaching the program terms in order to mitigate any chance of
| a class-action law suit.
| unloco wrote:
| I wish I didnt read this. Now I feel dirty because it's
| exactly what's happening.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I also think there's an element of balancing investments
| and returns. If Amazon is missing out (or "losing") $50
| million per year from eroded trust, then they should invest
| $49.9 million in fighting the fraud regaining that trust.
| But they need not invest more.
| GordonS wrote:
| > These are then immediately followed by a 1 star review along
| the lines of "This is the biggest piece of junk I've ever
| bought online. Will be returning to Amazon. DO NOT BUY!"
|
| Sometimes I wonder about even these ones though - they could
| have been written by those with a competing product being sold
| on Amazon.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. And now suddenly the whole review feature of
| Amazon is dead.
| jader201 wrote:
| > For example, a product gets a lot of 5 star reviews stating
| that the buyer bought it for their child/relative/friend and
| they are just sure that they will love it... 5 stars! Or "I
| just got this delivered yesterday and I haven't used it yet but
| it looks really great!"... 5 stars.
|
| That doesn't sound necessarily fake, that just sounds like
| humans being humans. You see this in many reviews on other
| sites, as well.
|
| Not saying they're not fake, but my understanding was that the
| fake reviews usually go through a little more effort than that.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Companies are amoral, they will usually only do something if
| there is profit. Amazon has no reason to crack down on fake
| reviews because they don't effect their bottom line either way.
| They want people to buy stuff using their site, they don't
| really care what it is they buy as long as they keep buying.
| There isn't a viable alternative so competition isn't the
| issue. So they can get away with a lot before people choose to
| leave.
| tsm wrote:
| > Amazon has no reason to crack down on fake reviews because
| they don't effect their bottom line either way.
|
| For various things (certain electronics/peripherals, certain
| tools) I deliberately avoid Amazon because I want something I
| can trust and don't have energy to decide which of the
| fifteen similar-looking things on Amazon is well-made and
| which is a fake or just crap.
| beardbound wrote:
| I don't buy very much on Amazon anymore. Mostly name brand
| stuff that isn't often counterfeited. Guitar strings,
| books, moisturizer and such. It is still very good for
| grabbing random widgets (I just bought a knob puller for my
| guitars). Other than that I mostly order from places that I
| know stock quality product. Sur La Table for cooking stuff
| comes to mind.
| bluGill wrote:
| The problem comes when you don't know. I needed a new
| battery for my Dyson vacuum - out of stock at Dyson, but
| online has a lot of third parties for half the price (and
| often more capacity) - but what do I trust as real? I
| ended up at Amazon because they will probably ship me
| something and if it doesn't work I have a chance to
| return it. I was tempted to try that Vietnamese company
| directly, but how do I know?
| coldpie wrote:
| I've mostly switched back from shopping online to
| shopping in local retail. If you're actually stocking
| shelves, instead of just running a digital flea market,
| you have to be choosy about what you stock. There's a ton
| of value in having someone filter out the trash and buy
| from reliable sources. I'm happy to pay more for that
| service, and usually I can get the item same-day since
| I'm already there in the store. For example you may have
| a local vacuum/appliance shop who has a direct
| relationship with Dyson and so can buy genuine parts on
| your behalf, or even have them in stock wholesale.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is a lot of truth to that, but it only applies
| where a local retailer stocks what you are interested in.
| There are a lot of parts that can't be got locally. There
| are a lot of hobbies that can't support a local store.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Trust is how you know. I trust Target, Best Buy,
| whomever, to sell me an actual Dyson battery. I've never
| had any problems with any company not taking an online
| return (except once with Amazon charging me for a
| replacement for a ~$10 item they said was delivered but
| wasn't). Amazon doesn't really stand out in that regard
| these days.
|
| That Vietnamese company with the 3x capacity:price ratio
| is probably selling junk. There are just so many more
| junk sellers (at least by name--maybe a handful operating
| all those names). So it boils down to taking a gamble
| when the odds are against you, getting lucky, and
| building a relationship or going to a retailer you trust
| already.
| bluGill wrote:
| Those I trust that would sell me the battery I need are
| buying from Dyson and so out of stock. They also charge
| 2x for a smaller battery. I'm left with janky brands:
| either from amazon or from janky companies.
|
| I've had great luck in these situations buying from a
| small company that filtered out which cheap brands were
| good products. However I already have some other reason
| to trust those small companies.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Often I will use amazon for research/discovery and might
| actually buy direct from another site which has a better
| price - gear for music in the UK for example.
|
| You also can tell low quality products for the poor
| English/Grammar and knockoff similar brand names.
|
| Amazons search really sucks quiet often a long tail
| search term will return product that in no way matches
| searcher intent.
| sosborn wrote:
| I always found it interesting how bad pricing is on
| Amazon for music gear. I assume they know that musicians
| will go to established shops (shout out to Sweetwater)
| and that people just getting into it won't know any
| better.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I've long since stopped buying anything from Amazon
| except the occasional book. You can't trust reviews, but
| you also can't trust that the product you think you're
| buying is what it says it is. It doesn't really bother me
| that I "can't" buy from Amazon, there are lots of
| alternatives these days. There are even more local
| options than before.
| totalZero wrote:
| I agree with your overall point, but I wanted to comment on
| this:
|
| > Companies are amoral
|
| This is presented as a truism, but it is not true. Companies
| can be as moral as they wish to be. One of the reasons we
| have found ourselves auctioning off the arms and legs of
| American industry to China is this race-to-the-bottom
| mentality of "it's just business" that prioritizes short term
| profit over the long term viability of a company. Yet those
| companies have lobbyists, marketers, and advertisers, which
| they use to fight expensive battles in the marketplace and
| regulatory forum. Some companies even have the benefit of
| being under the same ownership umbrella as a venerated
| newspaper or popular cable news network.
|
| Morality doesn't dissipate into thin air just because a few
| people throw their lot in together and try to make money.
| Apart from having financial incentives to do no harm to their
| customers or areas of service, companies have the capacity to
| make decisions based on reasoning about what is right and
| what is wrong. There is no fiduciary duty to do harm for the
| sake of profit.
| ziml77 wrote:
| > I usually search for reviews written by people who have had
| the product for a week or two and give the pros/cons along with
| a less than 5 star rating. That helps me avoid the fakes and
| the idiots.
|
| Might only help somewhat with the fake reviews. From the
| "Avoiding Detection" section:
|
| "Fraudulent businesses give reviewers specific criteria to
| follow to avoid detection on Amazon. These criteria are
| designed to present the reviews as legitimate. In this
| ElasticSearch server, vendors asked reviewers to wait a few
| days before publishing a review. They also request substantial
| reviews that are longer than just a few words, and may even
| outline certain details that should be included in the review."
| moksly wrote:
| Maybe the reason they aren't cracking down on it is exactly
| because of their analytical genius?
|
| I'm not sure how Amazon operates in the US, but in Northern
| Europe it's main target very clearly isn't the informed
| customer, but the people who's next step is going on one or the
| Chinese sites like wish. Maybe having a lot of fake reviews is
| simply better than having few reviews for their target
| audience? Hell, half the stuff on Amazon.de is resales of
| things that are clearly imported from China, so maybe Amazon's
| role is simply to broker these wares in a manner that's not as
| prone to getting the buyer scammed? Or maybe shit reviews is
| just better for sales than no reviews?
| anovikov wrote:
| What's the problem with the Chinese sites? Whole large
| businesses are based on simply buying on them and reselling
| offline... Yes they sell crap, but these days, everyone sells
| crap. It's just a difference between poorly advertised cheap
| crap and well-advertised expensive crap.
| shawnz wrote:
| I think that's exactly their point: Amazon uses fake
| reviews to make the poorly advertised cheap crap look like
| well advertised expensive crap. Therefore, you're more
| likely to trust Amazon instead of buying the exact same
| product from Aliexpress.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > For example, a product gets a lot of 5 star reviews stating
| that the buyer bought it for their child/relative/friend and
| they are just sure that they will love it... 5 stars! Or "I
| just got this delivered yesterday and I haven't used it yet but
| it looks really great!"... 5 stars.
|
| Exclamation points are the giveaway in most fake reviews.
|
| The same goes for Glassdoor. The more exclamation points in a
| 5-star review of a company, the more likely it was written by
| an HR person or the CEO.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Another suspicious element is the extremes of 1 and 5. At
| best its a 'you either love it or hate it', at the very least
| it is controversial. Amazon could flag it as such.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Don't forget the one-star reviews for shipping problems.
| "Arrived broken because the box was smashed in half" is still
| marginally more useful than "arrived three days late". They're
| both irreverent when comparing the products themselves.
|
| For that matter, buying USB charging hubs is a nightmare. The
| reviews are identical on every single one: there's always at
| least one who overloaded theirs and complained that their house
| burnt down.
| moftz wrote:
| I always like seeing the most recent reviews since it can
| sometimes show that people have started receiving knockoffs or
| that there's been a rapid change in quality of a product. The
| most helpful review is like months to a year old so it
| sometimes doesn't accurately reflect the product anymore. Some
| people really are just idiots and either purchased something
| very cheap expecting high quality or they give high ratings for
| a product when they outline serious flaws in the review.
|
| I usually don't buy random junk off of amazon all the time like
| some do so when I make a purchase, I already know exactly what
| I want and it's something totally necessary.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I've also seen cases where items have been poorly reviewed but
| only because according to reviews section the people who bought
| the item were all incapable of using it correctly.
|
| I saw an amazon review of someone complaining that a drill bit
| they bought got bent drilling through a brick. The picture they
| provided showed quite clearly that they had severely damaged
| and bent a brad-point drill bit (which is meant to be used for
| wood). The bending can also be explained by the fact that these
| drill bits are usually nowhere near as hard or brittle,
| presumably because if you ever try to use a drill bit intended
| for drilling through metal to drill wood you will quickly find
| how easy it is to snap it when it's in a thick bit of wood, and
| people don't usually drill deep holes in metal without a drill
| press to keep the drill going straight.
|
| Oh, and the worst part of the amazon experience has to be the
| number of "Answers" to "Questions" where the answer is just:
| "Sorry, I don't know the answer."
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical
| genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly
| obvious.
|
| It's probably one of those situations where it's obvious, but
| not provably so.
|
| It's like when you pass a huge pile of random bike parts in a
| pile next to a homeless encampment: it's 100% a bike chop shop,
| duh, anyone can see that...but you can't _prove_ that it 's a
| chop shop just based off of what you saw, so police can't take
| action without substantial further investigation.
|
| It's easy enough for us as to consumers to spot fake reviews,
| but can you _prove_ that they 're fake just because they're
| repetitive or awkwardly written or whatnot?
| sdgasg wrote:
| > These are then immediately followed by a 1 star review along
| the lines of "This is the biggest piece of junk I've ever
| bought online. Will be returning to Amazon. DO NOT BUY!"
|
| I really wish Amazon expose return rate for each product. That
| would be better indication of customer satisfaction.
|
| Also I wish there was not such a stigma against returning
| products. That would be a good way to drive bad players out of
| business. A few times when I returned something I apologized
| too much but store employees said that I am doing them a favor
| by returning it because this is how they determine what to stop
| selling in their store and prevent shier people from buying
| junk products.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I've spoken to Amazon sellers. They are forced to accept even
| the most ridiculous refund claims, because at the slightest
| smell of trouble, Amazon will ban their accounts. It's scary
| how their algorithms can literally ruin a persons livelihood.
|
| I don't see why sellers should be worse off then buyers on
| Amazon, seeing as they're both customers.
| [deleted]
| sdgasg wrote:
| There always will be certain percentage of people who will
| take advantage of return policies. I am sure at Amazon's
| scale, they can detect abusers easily. Most people hate to
| return stuff, and I think retailers take advantage of that,
| in general. That's why you see obvious lies in
| advertisements. Tesla's Autopilot mode? If society accepted
| returning defective or subpar products, then I doubt
| retailers will over-promise or sell subpar products.
|
| Another option might be no returns at all. This way buyers
| will need to do their due diligence before buying and less
| likely to impulse purchase crap. Probably better for the
| society as a whole. Also things will be cheaper as
| retailers will not need to account for any returns.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Don't forget the super obvious:
|
| "Update: support contacted me..."
|
| They just straight up PayPal you money to change your negative
| review. Trick is once they pay change your review back and say
| they paid you but Amazon will likely remove the review at that
| point.
|
| One way to fix is to only allow verified purchases.
|
| Amazon also needs to remove the ability for sellers to request
| reviews be removed.
|
| Amazon also needs to be less strict on negative reviews. Right
| now it doesn't seem there's any moderation on five star but if
| you put 1 star they really don't approve them much. Most of
| mine have been declined.
|
| They need to stop sellers from taking over older product pages
| or switching what product a page is sold on. There's this
| common scam where they will sell a legit gizmo and get high
| reviews them swap it for the junk scam item. No idea why they
| let this happen as it seems so obvious but who knows.
|
| Also need to really ramp up moderation of third party sellers.
| Start being picky about what they allow to be sold. Anything
| sold in the sad card category needs to be manually verified.
| ww520 wrote:
| I brought a product from Amazon and returned it since it's
| defective. Posted a 3 star review, which I thought it's fair.
|
| For the next two months someone from the seller company
| constantly sent me emails offering a $30 gift card to me to
| change the rating to a 5 star. So those "it's trash...5 star"
| are probably people being paid to change their initial review.
|
| I've thought about taking their money but added in a statement
| in the review that the 5 star was a paid request from the
| seller, just to screw their practice a bit. But stopped fearing
| that Amazon might ban my account.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| > This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical
| genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly
| obvious.
|
| I used to work at Amazon, and can say that this came up on
| internal mailing lists _all._ _the._ _time._ It really bothers
| people, particularly engineers who see that it is eroding
| customers ' trust in Amazon. It's really bad, and people know
| it. There were significant teams trying to work on it when I
| left.
|
| I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-
| and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and
| the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection.
| It's very adversarial, and Amazon has the tough position of
| _also_ not wanting to discourage legitimate reviews and
| sellers. And there are _so many_ sellers that solutions need to
| scale well.
|
| So: I think they're trying, but it's a bona fide hard problem.
| fastball wrote:
| Doesn't Amazon allow sellers to send freebies to people and
| still count as a verified purchaser?
|
| For me, a good start would be:
|
| - Only allow people to rate things that they bought with
| their own money, as evidenced by a credit card or bank
| account linked with their name on it.
|
| - Only allow people to rate things after they have purchased
| multiple products, or after you've spent above a certain
| threshold (e.g. $100).
|
| AFAICT, those are not currently requirements on Amazon and
| would go a long way (in my layman's imagination) towards
| fixing the problem.
| fma wrote:
| Item 1) Currently, sellers give out coupons codes that make
| a $50 item into a $5 item. People buy in reviews group buy
| it...it counts as a purchase and Amazon marks their review
| as "Verified Purchase".
|
| Item 2) Professional reviewers have purchased multiple
| products above certain threshold.
|
| Easier way to stop this is to prevent reviews from people
| who used a coupon to buy something and the price is above
| some threshold (i.e. seller doesn't knock to $5 between
| 10PM and midnight for their reviewers to buy it).
|
| If I can think of this solution - why can't Amazon? Simple
| answer is they know of this behavior and encourage it.
|
| I have shifted my purchasing behavior to buy from Walmart,
| Target, Ebay when at all possible. I know Walmart isn't
| exactly an angel - but I'd rather have 2 devils in the
| marketplace than 1. I even try to buy books from Barnes And
| Noble...but unfortunately the fulfillment time + price is
| hard to beat w/ Amazon. I rarely have books above the B&N
| threshold for free shipping.
| tasssko wrote:
| Ebay helped facilitate a fraud against me and are still
| on my black list. The whole process was horrible and
| costly. Up until it happened i used them regularly to buy
| and sell. I know its tangential but my thoughts are based
| on your white list. Essentially eBay and to a degree
| Amazon are perpetrating fraud indirectly on a massive
| scale.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Unfortunately, I don't think those would help, and they
| might hurt.
|
| Your first suggestion doesn't address paid reviews. Usually
| the scheme is "buy it, and we will reimburse you with a
| little extra on top after you leave a review."
|
| Your second suggestion would probably bias _towards_ fake
| reviewers. It 's pretty rare for someone to get paid just
| for one review.
|
| One of the hard things to realize is that paid reviews are
| written by real people. Most of them probably know they are
| doing something shady, but not all - some think this is a
| legitimate marketing interaction. Many of them also leave
| real reviews for stuff - including negative reviews. It's
| generally not actually bots writing reviews.
| [deleted]
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Sure, but it would surely reduce the scale of these fake
| reviews. Right now, companies can buy reviews in batches
| of thousands; the only actual cost is in
| somebody/something creating that review and some
| overhead.
|
| If Amazon also required actual purchase of that item, now
| there's the extra cost of actually buying that item. Even
| more so when you're talking about things that are
| expensive. This would drastically lower the amount of
| spam that could be generated unless the company wants to
| throw some huge money at it.
|
| Returned items would still potentially be an issue, but
| I'm guessing Amazon already has things in place to kick
| off users that return too many items.
| azinman2 wrote:
| As we learned in this breach, people are buying themselves
| and then getting reimbursed via PayPal.
| joshhart wrote:
| Why not have certified users who have a clear history of
| buying things on the platform that can provide "trusted"
| reviews? Certainly there might still be a problem with
| sellers spamming people to ask for reviews in money but I
| think it would up the bar substantially. You can then improve
| this by only allowing reviews from people with known
| purchases.
|
| You can roll this out with two 5-star rating systems and
| replace the old one once the new one has enough ratings.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Thats a huge myth.
|
| The problem was created by amazon and can be fixed by Amazon.
|
| Close the backdoor entrance for chinese sellers, and problem
| solved.
|
| Amazon made it easy for random chinese companies to onboard
| as amazon sellers because it lowered every single barrier
| from an import/ banking/permit perspective
|
| Amazon can close that door anytime it wants.
| prima_cookie wrote:
| but hey, I get free giftcards from those guys for copy-
| pasting the review they email me after buying a product
| from them...
| BeetleB wrote:
| > and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade
| detection.
|
| Let's not forget that it is _Amazon_ that is providing this
| huge monetary incentive.
|
| As a customer, I really wouldn't care if Amazon dropped _all_
| 3rd party sellers. Most users won 't. Amazon, of course,
| will.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale
| well.
|
| This actually raises a core part of the problem: why does
| Amazon need literally dozens of sellers for every piece of
| junk on the site? For any sort of commodity on the site,
| there can be _thousands_ of results. All the same. All within
| a few percent of the same price. All completely
| indistinguishable through any mechanism in the search
| facility. There have been so many times that I 've been
| looking for something with a specific feature, and it's just
| page after page after page of stuff I don't want, that I
| finally give up and just buy the crap they're shoving at me.
| That brutally-carnal competition for every nickel and dime is
| a big part of the motivation to flood the platform with fake
| reviews.
|
| What made Amazon great at the start was the fact that they
| DID NOT carry every conceivable item under the sun, from
| every single person who wants to spin up a mercantile account
| and give it a whirl. I've gone back to buying most things
| from brick-and-mortar stores because THEY are still doing the
| curation. They're not going to carry 17,000 different USB
| cables, and the ones they do are going to be high-enough
| quality that they don't have a high rate of return. I wish
| Amazon all the worst. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: No one shops
| at Amazon any more; it's too crowded.
| Traster wrote:
| I think this actually works in Amazon's favour. It's a
| completely intractable problem to find the best widget from
| 17 pages of almost identical widgets with completely
| unstructured data to sift through. So what do customers do?
| They buy the Amazon recommended choice. It serves two
| purposes, it crowds out any competitive market place whilst
| capturing practically all of the value by determining what
| gets put in front of the customer first.
| the-pigeon wrote:
| > I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of
| cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon,
| and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade
| detection.
|
| Honestly it's really hard to believe you. That may have been
| what you were told but there's hundreds of well documented
| cases of sellers manipulating reviews where Amazon does not
| penalize the seller.
|
| The logical explanation is Amazon has decided not to punish
| sellers who manipulate reviews if Amazon thinks it's a net
| gain for Amazon.
| [deleted]
| spenczar5 wrote:
| > Honestly it's really hard to believe you.
|
| Yeah, I get it. For what it's worth - I didn't just get
| told they care, I saw some of the systems that were built
| to work on detection.
|
| Amazon is not a very short-term oriented company. They're
| usually pretty good at caring about long-term dominance to
| get dollars in ten years rather than pennies today. It's
| clear as day to anyone that fake reviews are hurting their
| image to customers, eroding trust. That's leading people to
| buy stuff elsewhere.
|
| At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the
| underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15
| years and has driven a huge increase in their retail
| revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly
| they're unwilling to take _really_ dramatic action like
| dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they
| realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term
| health of the retail business.
|
| It's hard for me to explain the cases where people find
| obvious fraud and the seller doesn't get penalized. These
| would get flagged internally in mailing lists too, and most
| of the time it was a process error somewhere - a ticket
| that got dropped when shuffled between the zillion
| different departments; Amazon's internal bureaucracy is
| _truly_ insane and huge. I think it 's usually incompetence
| rather than devious cleverness, honestly.
|
| There are probably some other cases that are more
| complicated (sellers reopening new accounts, and then doing
| social engineering on unwitting poorly-paid support people
| to regain listings). I think those are kind of rare.
|
| ---
|
| Anyway, all this to say: I get it, it's hard to believe
| because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful.
| But... they're really not. It's a huge, slow, bureaucratic,
| sludgy company. They have some money (okay, a _lot_ of
| money) and technical talent but it isn 't super clear how
| you'd apply those to this problem. It's hard.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the
| underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last
| 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail
| revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So,
| certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic
| action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I
| still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial
| for the long-term health of the retail business.
|
| This is a long winded way of saying "Yeah it sucks, but
| we're not losing as much money as we are making because
| of this, so we're not as invested in fixing this
| problem."
|
| I'm not doubting whether they want it fixed. I'm doubting
| the priority they put on it.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to
| think of Amazon as all-powerful.
|
| This has nothing to do with thinking Amazon is all-
| powerful, and everything to do with thinking they don't
| care because it makes them money. Amazon's revenue is
| clearly skyrocketing and they make a ton of money because
| of the marketplace. It seems obvious to me they made the
| decision to put revenue/profits over long-term customer
| support.
|
| You believe that Amazon wants to solve the problem. I
| believe Amazon doesn't want to solve the problem, because
| they make more money not solving it now. And talking
| about the long-term vision of a company whose founding
| CEO just stepped down is pretty meaningless.
|
| I'll be more blunt. Amazon saying they care about fake
| reviews is like Facebook saying they care about privacy.
| They make money by lying about it, not fixing it.
| Facebook clearly hasn't suffered the long term damage of
| years of horrible PR using their stock price as a metric
| (you know, the only metric that really matters), and
| Amazon likely won't either (in fact they've had just as
| much bad PR and look at them now).
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Think about that initial paragraph for a moment. You
| assume it is because it makes them money but you also
| assume it is a choice on their part - that they could do
| something about it that works.
|
| That is basically the same thing as all powerful in this
| context. It is the same pattern of sinisterization in the
| whole "Big Tech Bad" propaganda push.
| Xeronate wrote:
| If you had ever worked at Amazon you would find it very
| difficult to believe what you do. Short term solutions
| aren't part of the companies culture. Andy Jassy has been
| around since the beginning and has the same core values
| as Jeff. Not to mention your argument could equally be
| made with Jeff as the CEO. It just isn't how the company
| works.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I have never worked at Amazon, but I have heard enough
| horrible things from people that used to work there that
| make me believe not everybody shares your opinion. In
| fact, those other people went out of their way to
| convince me not to take a job there.
|
| I am glad you seem to enjoy working at Amazon, or at
| least have a respect for the culture. I've never been
| there so I can't comment on it, but I've heard _lots_ of
| horrible things about the culture there. And lately the
| complaints have been shifting towards Amazon thinking
| more and more about short-term profits instead of the big
| picture.
|
| All I can say is not everybody agrees with you.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| I don't speak for my employer, which is Amazon.
|
| FWIW, single data point, YMMV, etc., but where I work
| (under AWS) I have never seen behavior that is exploitive
| of the customer like you're talking about to be
| encouraged or allowed.
|
| Yes, AWS may be different from how things are done in
| retail, and we're huge so I'm sure it does happen here
| and there -- but from my admittedly limited vantage
| point, Bezos' heavy emphases on long-term thinking and
| earning the customer's trust have taken deep root
| everywhere I've been able to see.
|
| Doesn't mean peeps always get it right, some choices are
| difficult, compromises have to be made, there are
| outliers, etc., but still, it's there. I've just never
| seen cheap thinking around customers, so to speak, and I
| really like that aspect of working where I do.
|
| If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the
| beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the
| beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.
|
| And I'm saying I think this is already happening, and the
| most talented senior employees are already starting to
| leave. This is going to take years, maybe decades to
| unravel. But I've already shifted away from buying things
| on Amazon because the experience has become significantly
| worse for me and I'm better off buying elsewhere.
|
| You're welcome to disagree, but I think Amazon is no
| longer about value creation but value extraction. And
| quite frankly it doesn't matter if you feel differently
| as an employee, because that's how I feel as a customer.
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| I always wonder how much you can truly unlink from Amazon
| for retail purchases. Even where a store runs on Shopify
| there is a good chance they are using FBA for fulfilment
| spenczar5 wrote:
| It's funny, you and I arrive at the same conclusion from
| different paths.
|
| You believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because
| they are greedy and evil and are happy to have it. I
| believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because it's
| beyond their capabilities, and that _nobody_ knows how to
| ensure trustworthy information on the internet.
|
| But we arrive at the same spot: I don't really buy from
| Amazon anymore either for anything where the quality
| matters, because I can't trust anything on there. I use
| Chewy for pet stuff, Newegg or Monoprice for electronic
| stuff, Lee Valley for gardening stuff - etc.
|
| In a way, I'm _more_ pessimistic than you: I think good
| intentions wouldn 't even help.
| andreilys wrote:
| What about the short term solution of PIP culture?
|
| Sure you get short term results because colleagues are
| competing against one another to not get into the PIP
| meat grinder, but inevitably it leads to burnout and
| people leaving.
|
| Not to mention Amazon's reputation in tech is pretty low
| b/c everyone knows about this management by PIP culture
| [deleted]
| sosborn wrote:
| > they make a ton of money because of the marketplace
|
| Would that go away once the shitty reviews go away? I'm
| not convinced it would. The economic impact would be on
| shitty sellers as they would lose revenue, but I suspect
| a lot of that revenue would just go to good products.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > where Amazon does not penalize the seller
|
| If fake reviews simply penalize the seller, you've opened
| up an attack channel where anyone can submit fake reviews
| and eliminate competitors from the marketplace. It's
| complicated.
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| "...Amazon...significant teams trying to work on it...but
| it's a bona fide hard problem."
|
| Random internet individuals: "But they could just..."
|
| Like so many things/problems - they all seem easy/obvious
| until you actually TRY TO DO IT, at which point you realize
| why all of the other very smart people haven't solved it yet.
| totalZero wrote:
| This is an oversimplification. Amazon also profits from
| fake reviews because they encourage consumer confidence,
| and most of the solutions that "random internet
| individuals" propose would result in some lost revenue for
| Amazon. The tricky part is Amazon's counter-aligned
| business incentive.
|
| I put it in the same bucket as fake accounts on Twitter. My
| guess is that Twitter can correlate many accounts that do
| nothing but troll and shill for particular factions, and
| probably has a registry of these accounts, but they also
| lose MAUs when they nuke accounts. They have an incentive
| to wait until user growth comes in stronger than expected
| before they ban lots of active users.
|
| For me personally, the biggest weakness of Amazon is
| commingling of inventory. I never buy things like
| lubricants and bearings from Amazon, even if the seller is
| an authorized distributor, because there's no guarantee I
| will avoid knockoffs from a different seller. I'd rather
| buy from Walmart or pay more for a specialty retailer to
| ship me the product, because Amazon inventory is often
| mixed with cheap knockoff garbage.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Can't you just only allow reviews for purchasers with X
| amount minimum lifetime amazon spend? Just make the cost
| benefit not worth it to do 500 scam reviews. They already
| have verified purchase.
| someguyorother wrote:
| That seems vulnerable to a version of the Scientology
| bestseller exploit.
|
| Let's say the seller is selling widgets. They get their
| phantom accounts to buy the widgets and thus run up the
| lifetime spend counter. Then they give the "purchased"
| widgets to themselves and just keep on selling them.
|
| All they have to pay per iteration is the overhead
| (Amazon's take), assuming they'll manage to clear their
| stock later.
|
| E.g. say a widget costs $110, of which Amazon's take is
| $10. The seller uses their fake account to buy 10 widgets
| at a total cost of $1100. The seller both receive the
| widgets (shipped to the fake account's address) and the
| $1000 from the "sale". The total cost is thus $100 for
| making the fake account look like it has spent $1000.
| dangrossman wrote:
| I don't think they're trying very hard.
|
| I recently bought a dog collar on Amazon. A week or so later,
| I got a large envelope in the mail, with "Amazon Early
| Reviewer Program, 2646 Rainer Ave S St 1020, Seattle, WA
| 98144" as the return address.
|
| Inside was a piece of paper with a code to "activate my $20
| gift card" by leaving a 5-star review of the dog collar,
| photographing the review, and emailing it to a very non-
| Amazon email. It also instructed me that "for security
| reasons", I should not include or attach this letter to my
| review, nor leave a negative review without emailing them
| first. All this still purports to be from Amazon proper with
| the Amazon logo on the paper as well.
|
| This is clearly a scam from the seller to buy 5-star reviews,
| and their product has plenty of what look to be paid reviews
| to me as a result. I tried very hard to find any place to
| report this scheme, which goes past review buying to include
| impersonating Amazon itself, and mail fraud. I emailed
| several Amazon contacts, used contact forms on their site,
| and contact forms I could find on the seller side as well. I
| attached photos of the letter.
|
| The only response I got was a form letter telling me that if
| I saw a fake review, I should click the report button under
| that review.
|
| This is just one example. Almost every product I've bought in
| the past year that came from an individual seller included
| some kind of bribe for 5-star reviews, from gift cards to
| whole "free products every month" programs.
| hughrr wrote:
| The other way round is the time I left a negative review
| for a phone case. I was emailed every day automatically by
| the seller directly to my email from theirs to retract my
| negative review. I asked them to stop. They didn't.
|
| I reported this to Microsoft as it was an outlook.com
| source address. Microsoft did nothing. My junk mail folder
| was starting to fill.
|
| After about two months of this i got passive aggressive and
| set up a script to email them a 20 meg gif with "fuck you"
| tiled on it hourly to their mailbox. After about a day they
| got the point and I stopped receiving emails.
|
| I think amazon have stopped sellers getting hold of buyers
| emails directly now though.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Brilliant.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > I don't think they're trying very hard.
|
| I agree. I don't get why there hasn't been more progress on
| this. The ratings are almost meaningless now on almost the
| majority of products on Amazon.
|
| Amazon themselves seem to be directly making the problem
| worse with "early access reviews" or whatever they're
| called.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| The problem is 20 years ago the people who were reviewing
| products were the buyers for distributors selling to brick
| and mortar stores.
|
| Amazon business model was being a parasite, benefiting from
| the system of high quality products and trust built into the
| system. Without having to pay distributors, buyers, and store
| rents. And lest we forget sales tax.
|
| But that old system is now dead and gone. So there are no
| trustworthy good faith reviewers.
| slantyyz wrote:
| The PayPal reimbursement thing has been going on since Amazon
| changed their review rules a couple of years ago.
|
| If you ask me, the new Verified Purchase shill reviews since
| the rules changes are worse for shoppers than the shill reviews
| with disclaimers (which were always easy to spot and ignore).
|
| It's a good example of "be careful what you wish for".
| emodendroket wrote:
| If you were going to write a fake review wouldn't you praise
| the item instead of just writing one that makes you sound like
| an idiot who doesn't get the purpose of a review?
| delecti wrote:
| A review that makes the author sound like an idiot still
| contributes to an item's star rating, and that's all a lot of
| people look at.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Perhaps but if you're paying you probably want it to be
| credible (the article describes vendors coaching people on
| what kind of reviews to write). I find it pretty plausible
| that people writing "bought it as a gift, haven't gotten it
| yet!" kind of reviews are probably genuine.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > These aren't to be confused with the indiscriminate idiots
| who can't be bothered to use their brains, who leave mindless
| reviews such as "This is junk but it was cheap and kinda
| works... 5 stars!" Right.
|
| What's wrong with that? If you buy a pair of headphones for 2$,
| you simply can not expect good sound. But if it works well
| enough to hear what you need to hear, this sounds pretty fair.
| sodality2 wrote:
| I got $15 bluetooth headphones from a r/buildapcsales post,
| everyone in the comments said it would sound like shit, but
| I've been using them for over a year and I couldn't be
| happier. it's got noise cancellation, battery lasts for close
| to a week with my heavy usage, and it's got really good
| quality. Maybe just to me, but I'm young, so my ears
| shouldn't be _that_ degraded yet. But I have gotten pairs for
| my friends and family and they are all happy. Sure, they aren
| 't XM4's, but they are literally $15, and I have gotten way
| more than that in value.
| Xeronate wrote:
| Objectively, I'm sure they aren't great quality. You just
| don't seem to care, which is great for you, but also
| doesn't make your advice givers wrong. Have you ever tried
| $200 headphones to compare? Also you go back and forth on
| they are quality and they are only 15 dollars so what
| should I expect.
| sodality2 wrote:
| I didn't expect much but they sound great to me. I have
| tried XM4's and other higher end headphones but not for a
| long period of time (just a few hours). But I know I'm
| not that bad at determining quality so they are at least
| pretty decent.A
| heavyset_go wrote:
| What's the model?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Hetyre HT9's, they are now listed for $40 but were at one
| point $30 with a half-off coupon.
| [deleted]
| irjustin wrote:
| The fast test is to see how many 2-5 stars vs 1 star reviews
| exist.
|
| If the 1 stars has a bump vs the rest, you better know it's got
| a ton of fake reviews.
|
| Legit products have a relatively smooth curve "long tailing"
| into 1 star.
|
| Soon though, the scam reviewers will start smoothing the curve
| out and then I don't know what to do anymore.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| In the pre-Internet world there would be someone at the store
| who would a) do a checkout of the product prior to listing and
| b) evaluate customer returns and act upon them, in order to
| protect the integrity of the store. Delivering crap would lead
| to consequences (in the worst case de-listing) for the vendor.
|
| Amazon doesn't do either - sellers are allowed to put up
| basically everything that's legal to sell somewhere on the
| world (including propaganda materials for all kinds of
| questionable groups including right-wing terrorism), and they
| don't care at all about complaints from customers about fake
| products or shoddy quality.
|
| They only seem to care when big media representatives short-
| circuit the system and raise a stink at the PR team.
| shockeychap wrote:
| None of this is surprising. I'm very sad to say this, but the
| internet of today, for all of its sophistication, sucks compared
| to what it was, and all the promise that it held, 20 years ago.
| zucked wrote:
| It's a race to the bottom. Always has been, probably always
| will be.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree. If you want to depress yourself
| further, think about how much potential for good we squander on
| the web in terms of medical information.
|
| If we had designed the internet differently (eg: with
| considerations for privacy, authenticity, verifiability) we
| could pool resources and have millions of people report on
| medications, treatments, nutrition, etc.
|
| If a regular person uses the web we actually have today to do
| their own health research, they're playing dice with their
| life.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| This has become a serious problem on IMDB as well. It's common,
| almost the norm for small releases, to have a flurry of reviews
| right at release giving ratings of 8 or 10 out of 10. They'll
| have glowing comments about how the director made such effective
| use of a shoestring budget, and so on. And then a little later
| this gets followed by a string of 1- or 2- out of 10 reviews,
| saying it's one of the worst movies ever and the high reviews are
| obviously shills.
|
| For larger movies, or over a large enough timespan, the noise
| eventually gets drowned. But it's made IMDB reviews useless for
| deciding whether to watch new movies.
| jerhewet wrote:
| Anyone know if sites like Fakespot will be incorporating this
| information into their review engines?
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Maybe you could train a neural network using confirmed-fake
| reviews to assign an adjusted rating to products
| naresh_xai wrote:
| And 2 weeks later, the guy will resell stuff from another
| account from different paid reviews. Which are also always
| evolving to capture consumer trust. Works especially well for
| products in usd 1k range.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Well that's why you trained a neural network and not just
| used a database!
| lesinski wrote:
| Here's why Wirecutter can make an entire business out of credibly
| reviewing products
| bogwog wrote:
| Honestly, the reviews are a big reason why I use Amazon. Even if
| I know most of them (or all of them) are fake, I feel safer
| buying from Amazon when a product has hundreds of reviews,
| compared to an online store like Walmart which may have zero
| reviews for the same product. It's stupid, but there's a part of
| my brain that likes seeing those numbers I guess.
|
| I wonder if there are any middle man review services out there
| that can offer product reviews to online stores, along with
| proper moderation.
|
| If I see a product on Walmart.com I want to buy, but there are no
| reviews, I'll usually search for it on Amazon just to see
| reviews. But once I'm on Amazon, they usually have the better
| price and free 2-day shipping with Prime.
| holoduke wrote:
| And you support the extortion of sellers who are suffering
| quite a bit. If everyone would use Amazon, the world soon would
| be enslaved by one single retailer offering the lowest wages on
| planet earth with zero to no respect for human rights.
| ben509 wrote:
| One test is to search for something that's obviously a scam:
| '2TB flash drive'
|
| You know these are scams because SSD chips with a high enough
| density to get 2TB in a keychain form factor are going to be
| cost thousands. When they're advertising $40 or $50, it's
| likely a 64GB drive with a controller that fakes the available
| storage.
|
| Run some of those listings through FakeSpot and ReviewMeta to
| see how they do at identifying scams.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| These days I DDG/google the product name I'm interested in and
| look for no-name forums on page 2/3 where people post at least
| a picture or two and an honest review.
|
| I'm 50/50 on affiliate links, but tend to trust them more if it
| links directly to the manufacturer's webstore.
| ericwooley wrote:
| I've been using https://reviewmeta.com/ for a while now.
|
| It removes reviews from most products, and shows you what it
| thinks the most trustworthy, and least trust worthy reviews are.
|
| It's pretty inexcusable that Amazon hasn't implemented a similar
| approach. They certainly have enough resources.
| josefresco wrote:
| I've used ReviewMeta as well, however I find the issue is that
| almost every product has suspicious reviews. If the average
| rating was 4.8 on Amazon, RM might lower it to 4.3 but they
| would also do the same for competing products.
|
| I guess maybe I'm lucky in that I've never considered a product
| with blatantly fake reviews, however I also recognize that in
| order to compete even legitimate companies need to "play the
| game".
| notacoward wrote:
| Yes. A great many product categories are _so_ filled with
| scammers that if you reject the ones with bad scores on
| Fakespot or ReviewMeta you 'll end up with nothing. Which
| could be an argument for shopping somewhere other than
| Amazon, except that you might only find one or two stores
| that have The Thing and then you'll have _no_ information on
| how good it really is. It might even be the very same thing
| you looked at on Amazon, or you might fail to find it
| elsewhere at all. I 've ended up buying some real clunkers
| IRL too, and found some unexpectedly good stuff on Amazon.
|
| "Caveat emptor" was a saying long before the internet, after
| all. No matter where you buy, you're taking a bit of a risk
| and should try to manage it however you can. I still use
| ReviewMeta, and often follow where it leads _if there 's a
| distinction_, but I also think we have a lot of work to do
| applying what we already know about gaming-resistant
| filtering in domains like this.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Spot-testing ReviewMeta just now, I see it accepts this, from
| #2 of the Amazon top 10,000, as valid:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R17NDQEUZQESUX/re...
| testplzignore wrote:
| I'm surprised the article does not mention tax evasion and money
| laundering. Those are surely bigger hammers than whatever would
| come from the FTC or GDPR.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I ignore all positive reviews these days as a rule.
|
| Instead I check a few of the negative ones and see if there's a
| pattern that indicates some sort of systemic issue with the
| product.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Am I the only one not particularly bothered by fake reviews?
|
| Because there's a button for "Helpful" on each review, and the
| most helpful reviews more or less generally get voted to the top
| -- and there are almost always some really long, in-depth ones.
|
| I don't even pay attention to star ratings anymore. I just read
| the top 10 reviews and get a pretty good sense of what
| _specifically_ is good and bad about the product.
|
| Even without fake reviews, star proportions were never that
| useful in the first place because they're not a random sampling
| of users, and people are way more likely to leave a review to
| complain than to praise, so it's biased no matter what.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| The problem is much deeper than that for sellers. Enough
| negative reviews can end your ability to sell on Amazon. Add to
| that, reviews are part of the ranking algorithm, positive
| reviews will play a role in where you place in a product
| search.
| thenickdude wrote:
| I think the problem here is that the products that aren't
| cheating on their reviews will get ranked lower. So although
| they're perfectly fine products, if they drop to the second
| page of search results you might never actually open them up to
| read their real human reviews.
|
| You can still read the real detailed reviews on the products
| you do look at, so you'll avoid buying a lemon, but you will be
| preferentially buying from review cheaters.
| danparsonson wrote:
| So the star ratings can be gamed but not the 'helpful' button?
| taeric wrote:
| Would be amusing if it was the queen's duck. (Probably more
| accurate to call it a honey pot.)
|
| Basically, as long as the stars are there, they capture most
| of the fraud?
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm sure it could be in theory but it doesn't seem to be in
| practice.
|
| I think the logistics would just be harder -- it's relatively
| simply to put a leaflet in the product advertising "leave a
| 5-star review, then e-mail us and get this bonus
| product/warranty/whatever."
|
| Whereas to locate a specific review to mark "Helpful" would
| need to be via e-mail with a link to a specific review in
| question, coordinated across several of them, with so much
| volume that it outweighs the naturally "helpful" ones. I
| don't know, but I've never seen it happen.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I'm with you here. I tend to read a few reviews to determine if
| I should give a new product a shot. If somebody takes the time
| to write a 250 word review that has some pros and cons and
| include some photos, I'm going to trust that review. Many
| products you can find a handful of reviews like this which is
| all I need to make a decision. If I'm caught between two
| products, I'll order both and return the one I don't like (make
| sure they have free returns). Works pretty well for me.
|
| Same thing with counterfeits which people claim are rampant on
| Amazon. Either I manage to avoid them or they're very good
| counterfeits, in which case I wouldn't care.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| I don't understand why folks (here) are so up in arms about this?
| It's well known.
|
| It's pretty easy to spot fake amazon reviews with very little
| effort, and buy accordingly. Also, no matter how tempted I only
| buy directly from amazon and never from their 3rd party sellers;
| just for easy returns. So on the off chance I get burned, the
| product goes right back. It's not that big a deal. It's not like
| I was going to independently find the best product on my own,
| without the help of amazon, without some trial and error.
|
| Maybe I'm too much of a sociopath. Allowing fake reviews is
| great. It vastly increases amazon's footprint, making sure that
| the things _I_ buy are and remain easily returnable. Scammers
| gonna scam. Let them.
|
| It's also easy to spot incompetent users that leave 1 star
| reviews due to their misunderstanding of the product. Or 5 star
| reviews of blu ray before it's even released. That kind of thing.
| You know, you have to actually _read_ the reviews ok? It 's not
| too much to ask, honestly.
|
| You cannot police this kind of thing to any reasonable degree and
| maintain cost/performance ratio where it "needs" to be. Maybe
| it's a little too loose now, but any improvement is going to be
| modest plus it will breed better scammers.
|
| I really rue the death of flash. It was sooo easy to filter flash
| and ignore the drek. Now where are we? I don't consider these
| fake reviews to be a problem; indeed they are a benefit. Keep
| them easy to spot, please.
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