By Nathalie Voit
Amazon initiated legal action on July 19 against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that allegedly orchestrated fake reviews on its platform, according to a company announcement.
Amazon said fake review brokers operate across the board on its website, soliciting fake reviews for everything from car stereos to camera tripods. The filing claims that participants in the scheme are rewarded with free products or money.
One of the groups named in the suit is “Amazon Product Review,” which had upwards of 43,000 members until it was shut down by Facebook parent company Meta earlier this year.
Amazon noted that it has a strict zero-tolerance policy for fake reviews. The company has more than 12,000 employees worldwide dedicated to detecting abusive activity–including review fraud–across social media.
Amazon has reported over 10,000 fake review groups to Meta since 2020. About half of them have been taken down, while the other half remains pending investigation.
The tech behemoth uses advanced technology, skilled investigators, and continuous monitoring to spot fake reviews before they are posted online.
In 2020 alone, Amazon proactively stopped more than 200 million suspicious reviews from going public.
“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,” Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services, Dharmesh Mehta, said in the announcement. “Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”
Amazon was a leader in product reviews, introducing them to the general public in 1995.
