Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobltobs | Hacker News Reader

> but Jessica told BuzzFeed News she doesn’t think she’s gaming the system; she’s trying to help brands grow their businesses in Amazon’s massive marketplace. “I’m just a pawn in their marketing scheme,” she said.

> Jessica’s activity, as far as Amazon is concerned, looks legitimate. She makes purchases from her own Amazon account and credit card, so her reviews are labeled as a “verified purchase.”

Don't know if Jessica or Amazon is the bigger crook here.

View on HN

I can’t see how anyone could conclude that Amazon is the bigger crook from that quote. She gamed their system, as criminals do, and now they must improve.

A much larger entity actively doing nothing can have much bigger consequences than many small actors operating in bad faith. It's one thing to try and improve your system, it's another to ensure a proper system is there to begin with.

her.

there is no system in place to stop those truly dedicated to work it.

My wow moment was the claim that Amazon already had to take action on over five million seller accounts! How do you even manage that number?

still to combat buyers like her you would need to limit the number of reviews by any account, CC, and email address, to a set number per month and year. Yes they can still cheat it but no need to make it easy.

Their anti cheat system is of course automated and can easily detect the ones that only give 5-star reviews or follow other irregular patterns.

> How do you even manage that number?

You start by not making it so easy to open a seller account. These fraudsters just open up new accounts after they've been caught.

Or introduce some basic standards or curation of what you allow on your marketplace. I’m talking bare bones very low hurdle here, not censorship. Search for headphones on amazon and tell me that Amazon is better off with the hundreds of identical knockoffs under different oddly worded ‘brands’ like “ALIHEN” or “Picun” or “Onpie.” I think the only benefit to amazon is that each of those individual actors then has incentive to lie, cheat, and steal to con people into buying their SKU through all sorts of questionable ‘marketing’ such as this. The only winner is Amazon.

"In other words, third-party sellers aren’t the only ones paying her to leave fake reviews and superficially boost sales — Amazon is too."

Would indicate that Amazon are and if they are in effect fiscally encouraging this practice then people like Jessica would take that as some form of legalised legitimacy.

Which is not the case [edit add]

[EDIT ADD] This is just cashback from Amazon credit card, just badly worded in article

She's just got an Amazon credit card that gives 5% cash back. It's not some deeper, more meaningful integration - virtually anyone can get one.

Aha, yip, my bad. Thank you for that, edits added.

The former.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com