Amazon has decided to take action against review buying and selling sites which try to make money by generating fake, distorted or inflated reviews in exchange for money or free products, and end up misleading users about the authenticity or quality of products that are subsequently sold in large online stores.
Amazon has already succeeded in shutting down other sites that trade on product reviews
The company has filed several lawsuits, both in the United States and in Germany, seeking the definitive closure of these pages of sellers of fake reviews, or incentivized, offering money or free products to users. According to Amazon, such sites mislead consumers.
The lawsuit comes against two of the largest companies buying and selling reviews Appsally and Rebatest. On these sites, members conduct reviews not only on Amazon, but also on other portals such as eBay, Walmart and Etsy. According to Amazon, “review sellers try to profit by misleading consumers and creating unfair competition, which hurts our business partners”.
Amazon has conducted an investigation into the activity of these review selling sites. Between them, they claimed to have more than 900,000 members willing to create fake reviews on various portals, including Amazon.
As reported by Amazon, AppSally markets fake reviews for as little as $20 and solicits its members to send empty boxes to others so that they can write more fake reviews and can send AppSally photos of the products to be published.
For its part, Rebatest only pays those people who write 5-star reviewswhich also does not provide a real experience to the consumers of the portals on which they are published.
This is why Amazon has decided to take this legal action, as the company comprehensively prohibits the publication of incentivized or fake reviews. To detect, prevent and eliminate them, it uses machine learning technology, along with analysis by human teams, to learn and be able to avoid such practices.
According to company data, in 2020 it was able to stop more than 200 million fake reviews before they could be published and read by its users. It is not the first time that it carries out this type of legal action, which generally ends up with the closure of the portals, as has already happened in the past with other websites in the UK and Germany that Amazon managed to get shut down by a court decision.
