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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I got an offer to this out of the blue once. They wanted me to buy some cheap product and give it a good review.

Of course I understand why this is wrong and unethical, so I tried to report it to Amazon.

There is no way to report this to Amazon. They have no facility for reporting a product that someone tried to pay you to review positively.

The only thing you can do is contact customer service who as far as I can tell do nothing with the report.

All they need to do is add a category to their customer service section to report fraud. It blows my mind that they do not do this. But not really. They make more money by allowing this behavior, both from the fake buyer, as well as the other customers who are duped into buying highly reviewed items.

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I totally agree. But where do we draw the line for fraud? I just ordered a $5.00 product, a pair of interesting-looking-at-first-glance earplugs for swimming, that are utter garbage. Included was something I had never seen - instructions for leaving a positive review that would allow me to receive a $10.00 Amazon gift card. This clearly appears to me to be buying positive reviews... which should not be allowed... but is not fraud... I do not think. Given that the product is cheap, I can see how people would leave positive reviews - lo and behold, the product has nearly a 5-star rating with 100+ reviews! I can guarantee nobody who swims would rate this product above 2 stars. Online reviews are a wonky and game-able system.

It seems fraudulent in that it would evidently not be an honest review, complicated by the fact that the review would essentially be paid promotional content because you were paid for it.

That sounds like a pretty clear case of fraud. It would only take one report with pictures of that coupon to remove the product.

But why would they. They have your money already.

Do you really think so??? Not asked sarcastically... I just tossed it in the trash because I thought it was despicable. I have a hunch that is what most people do who do not just claim the gift-card. What a heist.

I just bough a £20 Switch controller that had a card in it telling me to email them for a £20 gift certificate if I left them a positive review. Obviously this works; it’s the best rated off-brand controller.

It would be very interesting to link the store in question. I'm very curious what other products they sell/what sort of store they have.

Because you're basically being paid $5 to receive the product. Basic economics says this is financially nonviable in the long term.

Something VERY interesting is happening behind the scenes with the store you stumbled upon.

I read these two articles recently that will probably resonate with your experience:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/14/20961523/amazon-walmart-...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...

The problem is higher level; Amazon simply profits from fraudulent behavior.

There are several things that Amazon could correct, and it doesn't. I've tried to report other types of clear-cut frauds (e.g. "placeholder" ads with good reviews), and either I couldn't find a way, or they didn't care.

The late borderline-scammy behavior of Amazon is obvious in different ways, for example how they intentionally make opaque the shipment origin and price.

The most ridiculous allowed misbehavior I've experienced is an item sold in a number of trivial variations that took hundreds of (search) pages. It was obliterating any chance of looking similar items from other brands.

You could leave a 1-star review explaining the product was garbage and they tried to entice you into a good review for money?

I often look at the one star reviews to see if anything is up with a product.

They can’t accept reports like that because the bad actors will use them to kick everyone else off.

It’s a complicated problem and I wonder if eBay’s best effort/don’t get involved strategy isn’t ultimately better because it forces everyone to pay attention.

I think it’s just not a priority. Unscrupulous sellers review-bomb competitors and even run “false flag” efforts to have other sellers banned already.

They can accept the reports and then use data science to figure out which reports are legit.

And Ebay definitely did not have a “don’t get involved” policy (source: I worked on EBay’s fraud prevention team for years). There was a reason you could only communicate via the platform messaging and you couldn’t send email addresses through the platform.

Countdown to sellers offering Amazon giftcards in exchange for submitting fake reports about their competition offering Amazon giftcards in exchange for fake reviews.

Exactly. This practice directly boosts more sales for Amazon which subsequently increases their stock price ensuring continued market domination. They could have easily blocked and prevented this but why would they do that? Until this becomes a bigger problem that lowers their market share then that's when we will see them begin targeting those fake purchases/reviews.

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