Fake Reviews and Inflated Ratings Are Still a Problem for Amazon

Sellers are taking advantage of the online-shopping frenzy, using old and new methods to boost ratings on products

By Nicole Nguyen of The Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:

"A charging brick recently caught my eye on Amazon. AMZN 0.95% It was a RAVPower-branded two-port fast charger, and it had five stars with over 9,800 ratings. The score seemed suspect but Amazon itself was the seller, so I added it to my cart anyway.

The device arrived a day later, along with a clue to all that customer satisfaction. A small orange insert offered a $35 gift card—roughly half of the product’s price—with instructions on how to redeem the gift: “Email us A. Your order ID (screenshot) B. Your review URL (or screenshot).”"

"An Amazon spokesman said the insert violates the company’s policy, which bans sellers from offering a financial reward for reviews.

Gift-card rewards are a common approach employed by sellers"

"The purchases are genuine, and the compensation is coordinated through email, out of Amazon’s view."

"The Amazon spokesman said the company analyzes 10 million reviews a month, using a combination of human moderators and machine-learning tools"

"Amazon recently made changes to its listings, such as adding one-tap ratings and including scores from around the world. While the intent was to increase the quantity of legitimate ratings, these changes can make it harder for shoppers to tell authentic reviews from inauthentic ones."

[there are] "found multiple listings with ratings for completely different products."

"After I shared the listings with Amazon, the company removed the offending ratings and the number of reviews plunged."

"People post images of sellers’ products on Facebook groups and review sites. To qualify for a rebate, reviewers pick a product to buy and follow instructions intended to boost a product’s ranking."

"The kickback isn’t handled through Amazon, of course, but through PayPal or some other service.

In April, following a U.K. investigation, Facebook removed 16,000 groups related to facilitating fake reviews."

"Some sellers track down customers who leave negative feedback on listings. Last December, Ben Hendin of Tulsa, Okla., gave two stars to an unsatisfactory finger brace. The seller sent multiple messages to his personal email, escalating monetary incentives to delete the review, from $10 to finally $40. Amazon doesn’t give sellers customer email addresses. When Mr. Hendin asked how the seller got his, the reply read, “Boss found it through social software search for names.”"

"A study from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California that was published last August tracked 1,500 products on Amazon with reviews solicited from Facebook groups. The researchers found that sellers continue to juice their listings with paid-for reviews because the benefit wears off after about a month—when unhappy purchasers start countering the high scores with low ratings—and because Amazon’s algorithms appear to put more weight on recent reviews."

"Amazon eventually did take action—purging . . . fake reviews . . . a lag"

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Study: Half of American Doctors Give Patients Placebos Without Telling Them.

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Rent a White Guy: Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing (by Mitch Moxley in The Atlantic Monthly, excerpts below)

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Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Thorstein Veblen (and Adam Smith, too!)

How does a company selling used luxury goods spot fakes? (signalling and conspicuous consumption).

Why do stores sometimes pay people to be fake shoppers? 

What if companies can't afford real models for their ads? Use AI generated fake pictures 

Excerpts from "Rent a White Guy"

"Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.

“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”

I was.

And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”

Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where Jake briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie, who, in his late 30s, was the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made."

"For the next few days, we sat in the office swatting flies and reading magazines, purportedly high-level employees of a U.S. company that, I later discovered, didn’t really exist."