> If the rules are approved, they’ll carry a big stick: a fine of up to $50,000 for each fake review, for each time a consumer sees it.
Amazon may owe the FTC more money than the world's annual GDP.
Amazon may owe the FTC more money than the world's annual GDP.
The article and rules make clear that this applies to the companies writing and submitting fraudulent reviews, not the platforms hosting them.
(If Amazon wrote a bunch of its own fake 5-star reviews for products under its own label, then this would apply in that case. But considering how many Amazon-brand products have terrible ratings, there's no reason to believe they've ever engaged in that practice.)
My prior assumption was that Amazon took a page from Walmart's playbook and would, ahem, borrow ideas for only the best/top-selling products.
And here's a 1 star item but it only has 1 review: https://www.amazon.com/low-rated-item-varenc-found2/dp/B09Z6...
I'm guessing after you hit some number of reviews and the average is less than 3, Amazon doesn't let you list it anymore. Which is funny considering Amazon lets you filter search results on 1-star or 2-star items only and up. Seems like that filter option exists just to make you feel like the higher star ratings are more meaningful.
Big if, but if these rules go into effect, I wonder if maybe reviews being harder to solicit could result in more consolidation of model numbers to concentrate the review scores?
That would catch Amazon if fake reviews were left on sold-by-Amazon products (and Amazon should have known that that was happening), but that seems unlikely unless Amazon is trying to violate the rule. Amazon disseminates a lot of fake reviews, even fake reviews that it has reason to believe are fake, but those are presumably not for Amazon's own products.
Under most reasonable definitions the seller of record should in fact be Amazon and not the person who amazon calls a seller....
As usual, corporations manipulate language to undermine government and citizen actions against thier misdeeds
This is like claiming that a kingpin could shutdown crime on his street - why would he, he gets a cut
> It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this Rule for a business to use or repurpose a consumer review written or created for one product so that it appears to have been written or created for a substantially different product, or to cause such use or repurposing.
Honestly, all fine products, nothing's broken etc. and I was very happy with such an amazing value for under $10. Werw they even fake reviews?
What does that have to do with the proposed rule? There is a rule against substituting in an unrelated product to get credit for reviews that were originally written for something else. Making a new batch of your product that is cheaper and worse than the old batch is allowed.
> Review Hijacking: Businesses would be prohibited from using or repurposing a consumer review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product. The FTC recently brought its first review hijacking enforcement action.
The scenario is explicitly part of the new rule, even if you'd otherwise have given it a five star review.
They're not giving you free products just for fun. One of the reasons is to get hundreds or thousands of good reviews
The parent poster describes a chain of six free products. They're clearly not doing this as a charity exercise.