I got an email out of the blue one day from a product company asking me to remove a link. I did so, but I never really understood why a company would reduce business opportunity (however minute) by asking me to do this.
Outcompeted by another product listing? Buy obviously fake amazon reviews and they would get suspended by Amazon for purchasing fake reviews.
I've heard that Amazon is now more nuanced in how they handle suspensions, but it's a mess.
Like if you want to boost your product with 1,000 fake reviews then you need 1,000 accounts that don't look like bots. Meaning they need to do a lot of different activities so they have a behavior pattern that looks like a real person. Which would include posting other fake reviews.
Of course in Amazon's case they could just require accounts to have purchased the item in question on Amazon to review it. But they must prefer more reviews to making it harder to manipulate reviews using bots.
These users have years of real account history and they really did buy the product. Its just on an external service, the seller refunds the money.
Of course, all this is complicated by the fact that most of these companies are probably overseas . . .
There are some legitimate uses to proxy through residential IPs, but I wonder what percentage of traffic through luminati is legitimate. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a single digit percentage.
Then, as a sibling comment pointed out, you just pay to get obviously fake mass positive reviews for a competitor, and suddenly they have a null rating because the market has removed all the reviews.
We know this and its not as far fetched as people might think - happens very frequently. The systems are designed to handle this appropriately. Fun to see how people try to game the system though :)
It makes it harder to detect that they're fake. For the same reason bots will try to friend random people on Facebook, follow random accounts on Instagram, etc...