Have you ever relied on customer reviews when making a purchase? Many/most have. Although many reviews on sales sites (such as Amazon) are legitimate, more and more sketchy companies are turning to compensated reviews to inflate star ratings and to drum up purchases.
Have you ever seen some random product for sale that’s from some brand you’ve never heard of, and the company has no website, and the product is significantly less money than comparable products, and yet the product has somehow garnered 15,000 five-star reviews since last week? We all have. Can you ever trust reviews ? How do you spot the fake ones from the legitimate ones ?
Below is a graphic where sellers can buy fake reviews. (Click to enlarge graphic)
This is their sales pitch:
These are just a few excerpts from this article: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/how-amazon-is-working-to-stop-fake-reviews
"Ever since Amazon introduced customer reviews in 1995, we have continued to innovate upon review features that help shoppers easily see and share positive and negative customer feedback that is relevant, helpful, and trustworthy. Last year, 125 million customers contributed nearly 1.5 billion reviews and ratings to our stores, providing future Amazon shoppers with transparent insights into the products they were considering."
"Our goal is to ensure that every review in Amazon’s stores is trustworthy and reflects customers’ actual experiences. For that reason, Amazon welcomes authentic reviews—whether positive or negative—but strictly prohibits fake reviews that intentionally mislead customers by providing information that is not impartial, authentic, or intended for that product or service. We invest significant resources to proactively stop fake reviews: This includes machine learning models that analyze thousands of data points to detect risk, including relations to other accounts, sign-in activity, review history, and other indications of unusual behavior and expert investigators that use sophisticated fraud-detection tools to analyze and prevent fake reviews from ever appearing in our store. As a result of continued investments, Amazon proactively blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews from our stores in 2022. We will continue to build sophisticated tools that protect customers, our selling partners, and our store from bad actors that attempt to profit by proliferating fake reviews globally."
Now you know if they "blocked" over 200-MILLION reviews suspected as being fake... its likely many more did not get caught. Also, with over 200-MILLION removed... were they removed before YOU read them while makeing a purchase decision ?
They also stated... "We are aggressively fighting review brokers. We will continue to take legal action to permanently shut down the fraudsters responsible for facilitating such reviews. Last year, Amazon took legal action against over 90 bad actors around the world who facilitated fake reviews, and we sued more than 10,000 Facebook group administrators that attempted to put fake reviews in our stores in exchange for money or free products. As of the end of May 2023, we have already surpassed that number, taking legal action against 94 bad actors, including fraudsters in the U.S., China, and Europe."
So... have you even been the victim of fake reviews? If so, tell us your story.
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