July 19, 2022 – Amazon is taking legal action against the administrators of over 10,000 Facebook groups planting misleading reviews on Amazon’s online storefronts in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.
Amazon states that the targeted admins commission bogus product reviews in exchange for money or free products and mislead buyers across its platforms. The company will use investigation from the lawsuit to take down fake reviews that have not been detected yet.
“Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services. “Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”
The admins operating these Facebook groups orchestrate illegitimate reviews for hundreds of products. “Amazon Product Review” is one of the groups identified in the lawsuit. The group had over 43,000 members until Meta, Facebook’s parent company, removed it earlier this year. The group’s admin managed to evade Facebook’s detection by swapping a few letters around in phrases that would get it caught.
Amazon claims that it has more than 12,000 employees around the world who are dedicated to protecting its stores from scams, including misleading reviews.
Facebook has long been used by sellers to boost the ratings of their products on Amazon through fake reviews. In 2018, a report by The Washington Post found some categories, including health supplements and bluetooth headphones, on Amazon to be plagued with fake reviews.
“Due to our continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts, we have seen an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services,” Amazon said in a blog post last year.
According to the company, it reported more than 1,000 review selling groups to Facebook in the first quarter of 2021. Since 2020, Amazon has reported more than 10,000 such groups to Facebook.
“The nefarious business of brokering fake reviews remains an industry-wide problem, and civil litigation is only one step,” said Amazon.
