Amazon, hard punch against fake reviews: broker in the crosshairs

Amazon receives every week over 30 million reviews: it is clear how to monitor them all to verify their veracity is humanly impossible. Humanly impossible, yesbut not for artificial intelligence and machine learning, on which the e-commerce company relies heavily (along with 10,000 real-life investigators) to track down those who denigrate or glorify a particular product solely for personal profit.

Cases of this type are now commonplace: think, for example, of the scam involving Aukey, or even that of RAVPower: in both cases, companies paid customers for them to issue a positive review on Amazon. But the problem is much wider, because now they actually work on the e-commerce platform fake reviews broker who manipulate the market to make money through illegal activities.

And Amazon has decided to sue who “orchestrates the buying and selling of product reviews in exchange for money or free products“, as in the case of AppSally and Rebatestwho helped deceive shoppers by having their members post fake reviews in stores like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Etsy“.

Jeff Bezos’ company guarantees that the vast majority of fake reviews are blocked before publication, thus avoiding compromising the decision-making process of customers who, every day, rely on the e-commerce platform for their purchases. Think that In 2020 alone, over 200 million suspicious reviews were blocked in time. A very important turnover, considering that hundreds of thousands of people would be willing to release a fake review in exchange for money (from 20 dollars upwards with AppSally) or a prize.

Last year, Amazon reported at least 16,000 abusive groups with over 11 million subscribers to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social platforms, resulting in their closure. The same fate that the e-commerce company now hopes will touch the two sites AppSally and Rebatest in the event that the legal action leads to the final sentence.