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Comment by insickness | Hacker News Reader

Last year, I posted a negative review of an inexpensive (~$10) electronic device on Amazon. A few weeks later, the seller contacted me with an offer of a $20 Amazon gift certificate to take it down. I didn't respond. A few days later, they offered $30, then $40, then $50.

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I've also received around ~10 of these same emails offering increasing prices to remove my review.

Maybe this is a good investment opportunity? I'm joking, but they did offer me almost twice the price of the product itself, which is interesting.

Something also curious is that the seller initially sent emails starting with with "Hi, [my sister's name]". Her name was not associated with my amazon account at all, and definitely not the name shown on the amazon review. I wonder where they are retrieving the names from for this.

Address info, maybe? That's creepy, I hope you reported it.

Your lucky. The last two times I tried to post a review on Amazon, Amazon declined the review under some pretense or another.

I've stopped writing reviews on Amazon. Apparently you can't talk trash about a product you were unhappy with....

I was offered a 50% refund for a terrible action camera. I took it (I'd relegated the camera to monitoring my greenhouse, so it was worth keeping at 50% off for that purpose), and they began reminding me to correct my bad review every few days. It started out with typical broken English telling me they were grateful for the opportunity to serve me and resolve my bad review, please go set the review to 5 stars.

Now I get messages asking me to please fix the review because they will get in trouble for refunding me and not getting a 5 star review, and they thought we had a deal. Sort of coercive, urgent language.

So creepy and obnoxious.

That's funny, you can make a business out of "leave bad reviews and don't respond to the first offer to change it" =)

You should take their offer and repost your review a week later, including some information about their bribery.

Those get taken down, with the motivation that they’re reviewing the seller, not the product, and should be on the seller’s page instead (where no one reads them).

How is the seller able to contact you? I mean why is the site allowing them access to your contact info?

You don't need "the site" to find info for someone whose name and mailing address you know.

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