Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harder to spot them
cnbc.com
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Same question applies to Twitter. Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts and bot networks pushing spam, conspiracy theories, and misinformation (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...) while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes.
ETA: Regarding comments along the lines of, "it's in their best interest to let fake reviews continue as it boosts Amazon's sales."
I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors.
Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews.
Amazon could do a lot more. I've just opened up Telegram to see what's happening in the scam review groups today, and within seconds I can see that this wifi range extender is being boosted by paid-for positive reviews: https://www.amazon.com/Extender-Wodgreat-Wireless-Repeater-I...
(The 5-star reviews on that page confirm the theory).
If I can do that, on a Sunday morning, from my home... why isn't Amazon?
Plus, sellers wash their hands of this by paying a company to boost their listings. It's don't ask, don't tell on how they accomplish that.
You buying positive reviews is intended to make more money for yourself by getting as many sales as possible including if it means another seller doesn't get that sale. The person buying negative reviews is intending to take sales from others so they get the sales instead. Either way, the intent in both situations is to increase one's own position at the expense of others in a fraudulent manner. You're both just as guilty.
I don’t understand why you need particulars if fraud is fraud though. They both got difference sentences and did the same underlying crime. Why do we sentence people differently, or is the view that we shouldnt be doing that?
Because there's no real way of measuring the cost of a fake review to Amazon. Yes, Amazon could do a lot more. What's the right amount to do? How much should be spent on that initiative, and why shouldn't that money be spent on other initiatives?
Safety and genuine goods are important things. If they can't or don't care about that, what makes it any more reputable than random vendors on aliexpress, for instance?
-Amazon could identify those fake reviews, but doesn't want to play a cat+mouse game and would rather leave the fake reviews as-is, and easier to spot. If they start targeting harder, the fake reviews will get harder and harder to spot.
-Fake reviews (even 5* reviews) may be placed on products by other sellers in a product category to try and get a product banned. The top ranked seller will earn substantially more than the #2 seller. If you're the #2 seller, pay for a bunch of fake reviews on the #1 seller's product, then gather evidence and submit to Amazon to get the #1 seller's product banned.
-Short-term incentive is for Amazon to leave the reviews (higher scored products get more sales). Seems not too probable, but not sure.
Amazon has been very fraudster friendly, and without any exaggeration, anti-customer, for a long while. There's several misbehaviors that they tolerate, while at the same time, make it difficult for customers to fight (report, etc.):
- they allow flooding searches with almost-identical products (ebay doesn't)
- they allow replacing a product page with a different one (ebay doesn't)
- they hide shipping prices and actively confuse the customer (ebay doesn't)
- they don't do anything against fakes, even when there are multiple reports (ebay is not great on this, either, though)
There's no reason why Amazon should not (by their strategy, certainly not mine) take advantage of fake reviews.
The achilles heal for sellers is that their listings ultimately need to show up When searching for unique information specific to a particular product. They’ll often try to hide that in an unrelated field or in the description. Usually a seller uses the same “trick” for all their listings.
By unique information, do you mean descriptive adjectives or product features? If so, these terms more often than not show up right in the title:
ProBien Case for iPhone 11, Liquid Silicone Phone Cover w Tempered Glass Screen Protector, Shockproof Durable Protective Rubber Cases Full Body Drop Protection 6.1 for Women Girls-Wine Red
60 Pack Guitar Picks,Cowalkers Abstract Art Random Color Celluloid Guitar Picks Plectrums Unique Guitar Gift For Electric, Bass & Acoustic Guitars Includes 0.46mm/0.71mm/0.96mm
COMFEE' Rice Cooker, Slow Cooker, Steamer, Stewpot, Sauté All in One (12 Digital Cooking Programs) Multi Cooker (5.2Qt ) Large Capacity. 24 Hours Preset & Instant Keep Warm
All of these items were on the first page of results for a single term (iphone 11 case, guitar pick, pressure cooker) so not only is Amazon failing to enforce TOS rules and guidelines against keyword-stuffing, the trick clearly works for sellers.
Personally I've been able to ask for refunds on Amazon through a 5 minute chat dialogue for products that were months out of the return period (I felt it was in my case because the seller wouldn't honor warranty etc, but this ease of refund/return is abused rampantly on both Amazon and Ebay by buyers).
It is too bad. Ironically eBay used to be the place all the random crap ended up, now when I order something off eBay I expect it to show up in better shape than from Amazon. Amazon turned in to the flea market of the web.
Maybe they can't? Fakespot authoritatively scores reviews but is there evidence that they are accurate? Anecdotally, there are many claims that the results aren't perfect, such as poor scores on a product where the seller knows there are no fake reviews. As a buyer the results on similar, shortlisted, products often seem a bit random compared to my judgement from reading the reviews carefully. Also, without knowing what reviews are identified and removed by amazon themselves we don't have much to compare it to.
Most recently amazon changed their review gathering algorithm in a way that increases the percent of customers who leave reviews. The acceleration in our review velocity is flagged by fakespot as suspicious.
Doing so is Fakespot's raison d'etre, but an unimportant side gig for Amazon. I did my MSc thesis on classifying fake reviews (https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html). It focused on purely text based features, but I am familiar with all of the literature and research at this point.
Non-text based features are more useful (classification based just on text is hard because believable fake reviews are easy to write) but the amount of non-text / behavioral data Amazon gets or would need to process would be a Facebook level of engineering effort - and is it really that cost-effective? (versus letting buyers do the work - humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see)
The removal of these 20,000 reviews (the FT article) is based on a straightforward obvious heuristic and so is cost-effective. But trying to track all the IPs from China leaving reviews? hmmm. But they should have got the distance and banned all the companies associated with the fake reviews; that would definitely send a signal.
Amazon has tried things like Vine etc to deal with the problem; Yelp and TripAdvisor have their own methodologies. But bad actors always seem to find a way around it. Automating the monitoring of communities where spammer groups congregate is possible but that is another major engineering effort - you just can't have humans doing it due to the scale (and Bezos doesn't like paying essential warehouse workers a decent wage either... so why bother with something like this?)
Shouldn't an excessive number of 5* reviews also be easy for a machine to see, especially when other indicators are considered?
For most Amazon detail pages I visit, I immediately sort by most recent. I have learned that the most relevant (which tend to correlate with earlier posting dates) are most likely to be fake, sometimes obviously so.
> I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors. Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems
Citation (unfortunately, still) needed. "Very big" means something quite different to Amazon at Amazon's scale.
If amazon adopted fakespot's algorithm, the hackers would circumvent it within a week. This would also happen if fakespot reaches a critical mass of audience.
I Amazon makes 1 billion extra each year, it can use it to buy a few of the "vendors" later on.
Profit now has more value than profit in 10-15 years.
Also, many people will be scammed by Amazon/vendor and they will never know it. To detect a fake some times a minimum knowledge is needed.
So, in the very short term, the Amazon customer is happy because he thinks that got a bargain, the seller is happy because the item is not returned, Amazon is happy because keeps their percentage. The authentic brand loses a sale and a year later it even looks bad when the fake fails and the customer blames the original brand.
And, if a customer detects the fake and complains. Amazon/vendor happily apologizes and returns the money. It is just part of being in the fake business.
These days, I only buy from Amazon if I need it quick and it isn't in stock locally.
This is not symmetrical.
This is their job for researchers without doing this they would be unemployed. A month of effort working on a small tight part of Twitter finding a problem and they get a large payday.
Twitter does this everyday and gets no reward other than maybe a slightly better network. They just get people thinking they do nothing.
What incentive? They're still a giant, and while I've seen people here on HN complain about it, I've yet to see people or companies stop ordering via Amazon due to fake reviews.
Aside from their own sales incentives, why should they invest in something that other businesses (such as Fakespot) are already solving? It's R&D costs they can just not spend at all, and if the public pressure against fake reviews starts to boil up, they can probably buy Fakespot for less than it would cost them to develop the functionality on their own.
What threshold would be used to remove reviews, how would it be fair to different listings?
Removing fakes can have significant negatives too if you have too many false positives. So to say that amazon or twitter is failing in comparison to fakespot or independent researchers is a kind of an incomplete comparison without knowing fakespot's false positive rate.
Now the reviews and rating are meaningless noise and I have to pick out a product to buy by looking elsewhere, which also typically results in me buying things elsewhere.
Legit manufacturers hate Amazon due to counterfeits. Ali is cheaper. Shopping websites get easier to make every year. Sellers can hook up to multiple websites easily. What's Amazon's moat? It's been "the reviews".
What alternative do people have here in the US? Go to an actual store? I just went to a local Home Depot to buy a power tool. The store was basically stock out on the thing I wanted from every available manufacturer, of which there are 5-6 Home Depot carries. But I could go on the Home Depot website and get any of them. Amazon destroyed physical retail, and now sits on the rubble and collects rent. The supreme irony is that Amazon is now ... opening physical locations. They built their empire on the notion that a storefront is a quaint anachronism of the undigital dark ages, why would they do that?
Not good for Amazon.
Tough to generalize based off personal experience but I think overall Amazon would benefit from more credibility and have it be a net positive.
What this means is that sellers are faced with an absolute imperative to get positive reviews at any cost, otherwise they die, while the flip side is that if they get caught manipulating reviews they maybe get de-listed and start over again. This imbalance leads to exactly what you see now, and it at least seems like as long as positive reviews are so important (in the absence of curation) this will be an arms race.
Sadly, there aren't many vendors with a wide selection and a hassle-free return policy. On Amazon, even third-party sellers often have a return policy that matches Amazon's.
If my orders from Amazon are in any way representative, SFP is well under 10% of volume (probably under 5%). I get way more non-Prime orders than SFP.
On the marketplace seller side I haven't come across anything that really strikes me as a better alternative. Review culture is pretty ingrained at this point.
1. Only read the bad reviews
2. Ignore the fake or irrelevant bad reviews
3. Ignore the good/bad ratio
Of course, if people are good enough at faking bad reviews, then there is a problem, but I like to think I can tell, and it isn't something that is practical to scale.
The whole idea of treating reviews as some sort of voting mechanism that determines what you should buy makes no sense. The way I look at it is, is there something non-obvious that is a dealbreaker? That's what reviews are for.
If I was running an e-commerce site, I'd simply not allow good reviews at all. Maybe have a sales counter that would serve to show how many people didn't complain.
In most cases, a 3-star review will provide a pretty thorough assessment of the pros and cons, and it's generally easier to determine the authenticity of the review.
The fact that these listings are so easily gamed is to me a sign of something seriously wrong at Amazon. I know from experience how hard the abuse problem is (it was my job for a couple years at Google), but this should be Amazon's bread and butter.
Why do you get completely unrelated products, even though there should already be plenty of relevant products?
Why is the option to sort-by-price is more like sort-by-random-order?
They get more money from you buying more.
If you don't buy anything they don't care one bit since there is 10 greater fools who don't understand that the search is bad.
The issue is basically whether the store has opened up itself as the marketplace for third-party-sellers, and how much they push these third-party sellers compared to their own products.
It seems like Target may be more conservative with their Target Plus compared to Walmart and Amazon. However, even Newegg and many other stores have gotten on the third-party bandwagon.
Edit: Looks like Target even hides that the product is third-party!
Instagram + Facebook are blasting sites like Rebatest[0] in my face for some reason. I'm shocked Amazon lets such sites exist. I'm not opposed to people asking for reviews, but insisting they are 5-star reviews seems terribly unethical. Not surprisingly, they have a referral program as well...
Intrigued by this several hours earlier today, I signed-up because who wouldn't want a reimbursement for a _good_ product they would have bought otherwise? Let's see how this goes, low expectations.
Searching Google for "rebatest vs" naturally yields competitors Rebaid[1]
So I look at the people who are panning it in their reviews. If they are coherent and reasonable, I’m going to think twice about it. If they are incoherent, shrill Karens, then everyone has those and it’s no big deal.
I do the same for development tools and libraries. It doesn’t catch everything, and I may see their point but am willing to deal with a consequence they couldn’t stomach. It does seem to help, especially with biased reporting.
This actually seems to solve the problem. You read through a bunch of them, and use your critical thinking to figure out if the problems are real are not.
Because the first couple are often just "this product broke after using it once!" which you can just ignore, because that's always going to happen to somebody and for some reason people love to upvote it.
But then you'll either start to notice a theme, or not. If there's a theme (8 of the 10 top reviews complain that the handle breaks, or that it's not compatible with Macs), then you can be pretty sure it's legitimate and probably want to look for a different product. But if there isn't any theme except "it broke immediately/arrived damaged" and then you start seeing reviews where people are like "it works fine", then you're good.
I dunno, but that seems to work for me. So thank goodness Amazon has the upvote button -- if it didn't it would make finding meaningful reviews a lot harder.
Why can't Amazon do it like Facebook and have a set of publicly trusted reviewers organizations whose reviews are shown with a "trusted review" mark and ranked higher?
Also: why can't regulators step in and demand that:
a) Amazon does not commingle inventory from different sellers to prevent fraudulent product from entering the system and being "washed" in the process, as well as provide end-to-end (from ingestion in the warehouse to the parcel at delivery) for each and every product they ship
b) Amazon employees have to manually review changes to product descriptions, varieties etc. so that "switch-a-roo" schemes where a vendor sells, let's say, plant seeds and then shifts the product description to laptop chargers while retaining the reviews.
This is the advantage that physical retail stores have: they at least know what they are selling and that it is reasonably free from fraudulent product.
Amazon is the unregulated Wild West, and frankly this has to stop.
How do you get reviews for the long tail?
That is up for Amazon to decide, but generally many countries already have established organizations. It should not be that hard for Amazon to hire one of the global market research networks to gather a suitable list.
> How do you get reviews for the long tail?
You mean for new products? Why not mandate that all products that are sold on Amazon have to pass review by two or three of the trusted organizations as a condition of listing?
friend working at Bose tells me: yeah, i know our IP is getting ripped off and we are getting either outright faked or clone-faked; but we are confident that people will continue to buy Bose because they trust the brand. brand loyalty might cut through whatever consumer preferences are shaped by the likes of reviews.
I guess the brand advantage is that at least you know what you’re getting.
The customer support person seemed genuinely confused - the conversation went back and forth a few times; "We can see that you haven't bought this product", "No, but I'm reporting a problem", "We cannot give you a refund if you didn't purchase it", "I don't want a refund, but this is apparently against your seller ToS", etc. I gave up.
These days I won't buy anything from 3rd-party sellers, and I ignore all 5-star reviews.
4, 3 and 2 are where the most honest reviews are. High 1 count is indicative of quality control issue. 5 star reviews is either a customer who was immediately excited about product or a fake review.
One book I found had great reviews. So good, in fact, two different verified purchasers were compelled to write the exact same review verbatim.
I mean if you’re gonna write a book on “dark psychology”, make sure you don’t screw up when you’re using it on your readers.
Fakespot it definitely useful and I use it quite a bit.
There seems to be a gap for lower priced items. I mean I don’t want to spend all day pasting in urls into fakespot for a $10 item.
I suspect there are a lot of reviews like this that aren't 100% fake (they're from different people who actually paid full price for the product) but are solicited and therefore not accurate.
(I'll never review a product where the vendor makes an offer like this. I used to report it to Amazon, but I don't think they care.)
> I've lost all faith in Amazon, now I use Walmart, where I get cheap junk but at least I know it's real cheap junk
> Amazon has so much data! How have they failed so hard to stop this?
> I swear I see this type of article posted every other week on HN
> I was recently hit by this! They even shipped it in totally real looking packing and outer shell, but the serial number wasn't valid/the company selling it had no record of my purchase/when I dropped it and the casing popped open I could see it was not authentic/etc
> This is largely because of comingling
> Check out fakespot/reviewmeta, they can analyze the comments and tell you which ones are fake
> This is Amazon's fault for making reviews so important for the seller
Let's go through a series of questions
A) Will lower review ratings lead to less sales at Amazon or more sales at Amazon?
B) will clear division between 'best in class' products and inferior products give Amazon more monopoly control over the market, or less?
C) Will the difficulty in getting easy fake reviews get more people to jump into selling things at Amazon or less?
Amazon needs a Tragedy of the Commons type of situation
That more and more small businesses jump in, generate sales using fake reviews, and give Amazon its cut
This in terms makes existing businesses smaller and more dependent on Amazon
They basically want 1 million companies each making $100,000 to $1 million a year at Amazon
Commoditization, so whoever Pays Amazon the most, can be boosted
And these 'pay to play' businesses are INDISTINGUISHABLE from the actual best businesses
*
Their aim is NOT
1) The best companies and the best products sell very well and get the best reviews
2) Customers buy more and more of those products
3) Those companies (providing the best products) become bigger and bigger
Their aim is 'Glorification of the Mediocre' - Commodification and Mediocritization of EVERYTHING
1) Every company's products sell almost the same
2) Companies are dependent more and more on 'advertising' at Amazon
3) Amazon's cut becomes higher and higher
4) An end point where Amazon can take 50% to 75% of what customers pay
Look at Audible and what terms they have there after becoming a monopoly
Same for ebooks where they are close to becoming a monopoly in US and UK
They first want 65% cut (if you don't give them exclusivity)
Then they want ebook and audiobook authors to spend out of their paltry 35% cut - to advertise their product on Amazon
So they are, in effect, asking for a 75% to 90% cut of what customers pay
Amazon should allow only bad reviews or reviews that speak negative points about a product. In addition to that amazon should show only the number of purchases made.
Fake (paid) reviewers usually write good about the product to support sales
As a user after reading the description of the product i would be interested to know where the product fails.
With this model, fake reviewers will have to write fake bad reviews on other rival products which is expensive to do and easier to spot them based on patterns.
Nothing new under the sun.
Of course I dont think anyone here likes the sound of the above, which i thought of after seeing deepfakes videos (was downvoted heavily).
If downvoting love to understand the negatives of such a system?
I don’t think that Amazon needs government backed identification to be able to weed out fake reviews.
They could start by allowing only reviews from actual purchasers of the product. (I assumed this was already a restriction they had in place, but I just checked now and, of course, they appear to allow reviews from any registered user).
They could also only allow reviews from accounts over a certain age or with a minimum number of purchases or who have completed additional identity validation, either themselves or through some other third party.
Point is, it’s not an insurmountable problem for them. It’s just either not a priority or something they actively and intentionally do not wish to stop.
Also and as I note above it isn't anything you are mandated to use... only use when you want to ensure veracity to what your saying, posting, publishing, etc.
Calling them 'consumers' rather than 'people' seems like a use of dehumanizing language to assuage your guilt. At least, that's how it comes across to me. When you accept a bribe for a review you're screwing over the living breathing human beings who might make the mistake of assuming you aren't a liar.
Amazon does offer a legitimate program for brands to offer free gifts in return for reviews, but it doesn't require those reviews to be positive.
If you follow Kant, the argument is pretty much this: if everyone would do that, nobody could trust any reviews. The right choice, according to Kant, is that which you can want to be made into law for everyone. You don't want reviews to lose all meaning as they're important information for people to learn about the products, ergo you mustn't fake it.
Should you blame them? Yeah, but it's a pretty small infraction and they're a small cog in a large machine, so don't be too harsh.
The question should be whether or not the embodied process is fair, in whole, to the users? As much as we worry about "right" API design here (or what is the perfect framework for CSS?), you'd think we'd worry about how bad we are screwing users with all this software optimized to make startups, founders, VCs and private equity firms more an dmore money with less and less effort.