From counterfeit goods to fake N-95
masks, price gouging to disappearing
orders, shoppers on Amazon have a
growing need to proceed with caution
before clicking Buy Now.
Since Amazon's early days, reviews are the
one big metric customers rely on
to determine the quality and
authenticity of a product.
Turns out many of those
reviews can't be trusted.
The review system as
of today is broken.
Before the pandemic, the usual benchmark
around our average fake reviews
was 30%.
The norm has now become
close to 35%, 40%.
In recent years, thousands of fake
reviews have flooded Amazon and Walmart,
eBay and others, just as
sales numbers have skyrocketed.
And as shoppers stay home, online orders
are up 57% since the same time
last year and the number
of reviews is up 76%.
There's an element where you simply want
to trust those stars and you want
to trust the numbers, because if you
can't trust that, how do you know
what you're buying? From Facebook groups
where bad actors solicit paid
positive reviews to bots and click
farms that upvote negative reviews to
take out the competition, fake reviews
have boosted sales of unsafe
products, caused huge brands to sever
ties with Amazon and hurt business
for legitimate sellers.
We can't compete. We can't surface our
products that are new and innovative
and truly valuable to consumers because
other products that aren't so
great are playing this
game of review manipulation.
We decided to find out why
fake reviews have infiltrated Amazon, how
customers can spot an unreliable review,
and what the trillion dollar
company and others are
doing to stop them.
One big draw over competitors like
Walmart, Target and eBay is that
Amazon's listings often have hundreds or
even thousands of reviews instead
of just a handful. It's so easy, no
matter what site you're on, to simply
say the most reviews with the most
stars means the most level of
happiness. It's just simply
not the case.
If those Amazon customers aren't really
customers or if they're an
organization of paid individuals who just sit
there and go five star, five
star, five star, that doesn't really
tell me anything meaningful about the
product. Review software company Bazaarvoice
did a study of 10,000
consumers at the end of last year.
42% of consumers are saying that fake
reviews from the brand itself would
cause them to lose trust.
82% of those consumers are saying that
would cause them to never buy that
brand again. The problem is fake and
real reviews are getting harder to
tell apart. When you have no reason
to think it's a fake review, that's
when the consumer's in
the most danger.
And as shoppers increasingly turn online
for things they'd normally want to
shop for in person, like the nursing
bras made by Simple Wishes, there's a
higher chance of serious repercussions from
the purchase of a counterfeit
or low quality product.
And if the product's Amazon page
is filled with fake positive reviews,
shoppers won't know to steer clear.
We see reviews of people saying that
their breast tissue was torn and
irritated and bleeding because
of irritating seams.
And, you know, we see things like this
or like this product broke or it
tore after I wore it three times.
You see those real reviews surface and
then all of a sudden there'll just
be massive positive reviews.
A high rating can also trigger
the coveted Amazon's Choice badge, although
Amazon did say it will delete the
badge if a product isn't adhering to
policy. Amazon prohibits any attempt to
manipulate reviews and told CNBC
it will suspend, ban and take legal
action against those who violate these
policies. For any review, even the most
genuine, it always is worth asking
why is someone writing that review?
What is the incentive
to write that review?
Free products and payment
are increasingly common incentives.
Sellers solicit pay-for-play reviews through
popular Twitter accounts and
Facebook groups with
thousands of members.
So I joined some of these groups
just to kind of poke around.
And the first groups I joined, there
were five different postings from our
competitor asking for a review.
I felt like I just struck gold
finding my competitor there, reported it to
Amazon and nothing happened.
UCLA and USC released a study in July
that found more than 20 fake review
related Facebook groups with an
average of 16,000 members.
In more than 560 postings each day,
sellers offered a refund or payment
for a positive review,
usually around $6.
Amazon told CNBC it works with social
media sites to report bad actors who
are cultivating abusive reviews
outside our store.
And we've sued thousands of bad actors
for attempting to abuse our reviews
systems. The FTC requires reviewers to
disclose any payment or connection
to the product being reviewed.
On some sites like Fiverr and
Freelancer, users get around this by
advertising marketing services, a thinly
veiled reference to pay-for-play
reviews. There's also the more direct
approach where sellers include a
note inside a package asking for a
review in exchange for a discount or
other compensation. It's hard to keep on
top of five million sellers and
600 million products.
There's always a few bad seeds in the
mix, and it's the bad seeds that get
the attention. It's not that
Amazon's sitting back doing nothing.
It's that the scope of what
we're dealing with is so vast.
There are legitimate paid reviewer
programs like Amazon Vine, Early
Reviewer and Amazon Associates, which
require reviewers to disclose that
they've received a product for free in
exchange for what's supposed to be
an honest review. But Amazon has little
way to detect a compensated review
when deals are made
outside these programs.
There's a Velcro panel in the back so
you can constantly reset the size and
it's always the proper support.
Sisters Joy Kosak and Debra Abbaszadeh
designed a new type of hands-free
pumping bra and started selling it on
Amazon in 2009, where sales took off
quickly. But for the past three years,
sales have been flat, dropping off
after Amazon started to openly court
Chinese sellers to join its
marketplace. Cheaper bras with an
exceptionally similar design to theirs
started popping up, getting hundreds
of five star ratings seemingly
overnight. When that happened, we saw
a pretty immediate race to the
bottom in terms of pricing.
The sisters have been tracking review
activity on listings from competitors
like Momcozy and sharing
the data with Amazon.
Our best seller, where we used to be
number 25 in baby, we over the past
ten years of being on Amazon, we
have collected a little more than 10,000
reviews. It took them a couple of
months to to increase by 4,000.
Big brands like Nike and Birkenstock
have been so burned by competitors
selling knockoffs with thousands of five
star reviews that they stopped
selling on Amazon altogether.
Although Nike's landing page still appears
active on Amazon, the items
there are being sold
by third-party sellers.
They're fake, they're counterfeit.
They're either bought from Alibaba or
eBay and then they're resold on
Amazon. So a lot of these
sellers are actually ruining Nike's reputation
and they're putting in all the reviews
into the official listing for Nike.
At times, big brands themselves
are soliciting fake reviews.
Last year, for example, skincare brand
Sunday Riley settled with the FTC
after it was caught encouraging employees
to post fake reviews on
Sephora.com. On Amazon if you're not doing
some sort of, you know, tricky
technique, it's at least one hundred orders
for each review that you get.
Bernie Thompson sells about 120
consumer electronics products on Amazon
from his warehouse outside Seattle.
Competitors have tried to undermine his
sales with fake review tactics.
We've had people take our most
negative review, the one that's most
embarrassing, and we've had competitors
vote up those negative reviews.
Let's say your competitor has a one-star
review on the first page, you can
buy 100 helpful votes.
When they're considered most helpful, they show
up at the top of the
results. And so you can really
harm your competitors by doing that.
That helpful box can easily be clipped
by bots instead of humans or by
click farms overseas.
The ones that I've been contacted by
are all in Bangladesh, India, I think
one of them, Vietnam.
They have computers and they've got
fake accounts and they basically turned
in this whole system where they go in
and just click on "helpful" once and
then log into a different account and
then click on "helpful" again and so
on to where you can just pay
for basically taking down your competitors.
Bots are also getting better
at generating convincing written reviews.
We actually see a lot of these
fake review farms leveraging open source
projects from these behemoths, such
as Google, Open AI, multibillion
dollar research firms and leveraging
it to produce fraud.
And by this case, we're producing human
like text that looks like really
realistic. Amazon's own algorithms do
usually detect these patterns and
remove them within weeks.
Amazon says we're going to wait 30
days and if we detect that there's
enough fake reviews, we'll pull
back those fake reviews.
The problem is, during that 30
day policing period, the product can
generate a whole lot of sales
that it didn't otherwise deserve.
In 2019, Amazon changed its review system
so customers can leave a simple
star rating with one click instead
of a full written review.
This tool that Amazon put out there to
make it easier for consumers to give
real feedback has actually made it
easier for the scammers to elevate
their star rating, just the volume, because now
all they have to do is say
all you have to do is click a button.
No one can tell who left the rating.
You will not see those ratings as a
list of authors on the bottom of the
page. And we see products with thousands
of ratings that have no body,
text body attached to them.
While a rating can only be left
by someone who bought the product, Amazon
allows reviews from anyone even if
they haven't made a purchase.
We see certain categories have over 90%
of the reviews on the product are
unverified. And when you look at them, it
just looks like a flood of bot
reviews. What Amazon does is they
give different weights to different
kinds of reviews and so a verified
purchase review will have more of a
weight than someone
who wasn't verified.
But the intention is that you could have
bought it at Walmart and want to
review it. You could have bought it
somewhere else and want to review it.
And then there's a slew of new
tricks popping up from bogus seller accounts
to mysterious free Amazon packages
appearing on people's doorsteps.
In one tactic known as Review Highjacking,
a seller takes over a once
popular listing. So you'd have these
crazy situations where, you know, our
product was a USB hub but
we had to discontinue it.
And somebody's selling like women's eyelashes
would take over that product,
change the picture to women's
eyelashes, change all the text.
The reviews would show
these 2,000 positive reviews.
But if you'd read the
reviews, they're not about eyelashes.
They're about a USB hub.
Another recent tactic involves seed packets
from China showing up at
hundreds of people's houses who don't
know where they came from.
The Better Business Bureau warns that
the scam, often called Brushing,
means the seller is using the seeds
to generate fake Amazon orders tied to
U.S. addresses. Then they can write
fake verified reviews about themselves
falsely inflating their
seller rating.
Then there's sock puppet reviews, which
are bogus accounts created by a
seller to write positive reviews
on their own products.
Sellers can also hack into a customer's
Amazon account and post a positive
review from there without
the customer ever knowing.
And they're all new products that are
getting reviews at an amazing rate.
It's just not, it's not believable.
With so many ways to create
realistic fake reviews, some start-ups have
developed ways to detect them.
Fakespot is one of these.
Fakespot launched a new Chrome plugin in
May that has a quarter million
downloads so far. It analyzes the
credibility of a listing's reviews and
gives it a grade from A to F.
The Fakespot Guard will actually catch
these sellers dynamically as you're
browsing Amazon.
And we will offer you an alternative
seller that is authentic and genuine
that we've seen before that
has high customer satisfaction.
Other online tools that customers can
use to check the credibility of
Amazon reviews include ReconBob, ReviewMeta,
the Review Index and Review
Skeptic. Shoppers willing to spend time
to vet their purchases can
manually spot fake reviews, too.
The number one way consumers tell us
they identify a fake review are
multiple reviews with the
same language in them.
So they're basically looking for
patterns in the reviews.
The second most important way is reviews
that are not actually about the
product. The third is
poor grammar and misspellings.
And the fourth, and I actually think this
is one of the more important ones
is overwhelming number of
five-star positive reviews.
If a product only has two or three
reviews that it's gathered over a long
period of time and those two or
three reviews look pretty good, consumers
actually need to give kind of more
trust to a product like that.
Clearly, that brand and that
manufacturer, they're not gaming anything.
If you do spot a fake review,
Amazon encourages customers to use the report
button next to each review.
But whether Amazon will take any action
after fake reviews are reported is
a different question. We go down these rabbit
hole that take a lot of time
to look for this information and then
we share it with Amazon and nothing
happens. And it's just exhausting.
After CNBC brought Simple Wishes' complaints
to Amazon, months after it was
first informed of the illegitimate
reviews, Amazon said, "We've taken
appropriate action on these accounts." Amazon
told CNBC it uses powerful
machine learning tools and skilled
investigators to analyze over ten
million review submissions weekly, aiming
to stop abusive reviews before
they're ever published. Getting Amazon
to actually do investigations,
quite frankly, they don't have enough
investigators to do all the possible
investigations needed.
When I was at Amazon, there was
a time when Amazon had about 20
investigators for the
whole United States.
There was over a million sellers on Amazon
at the time and there were 20
investigators. In an unprecedented move,
Amazon hosted a virtual
conference earlier this month to give tips
and listen to concerns from its
third party sellers, who make up
58% of Amazon's e-commerce business.
When it comes to outside regulation,
fake reviews are prohibited by the
FTC, but it's a complex issue.
Where you can leave a review and
you receive some kind of compensation, you
need to put in a disclaimer.
And that's consumer law.
That's been around for a while.
But there are different ways that
this is now being gamed.
There is no law attached to ratings
where you can leave them without text.
Targets and Walmart, they are they
are held to a higher standard.
They have to vet products that they
put on their shelves or through their
e-commerce platform because
they are liable.
And that's the huge difference here.
Unless Amazon is purchasing the product
from the seller as a wholesale
purchaser and they are representing as
the seller, they have zero
liability. And that's frightening.
Last year for the first time, the
FTC prosecuted a company for fake reviews
on Amazon. The inflated reviews were
for a weight loss supplement that's
made with a plant that
can cause acute liver failure.
You can already see the FTC
becoming more interested in reviews.
They treat reviews as a form of
advertising because of the influence that
it has on us as shoppers.
Now, Amazon supports a California Assembly
bill that would subject online
marketplaces to the same
product liability requirements as
brick-and-mortar retailers, despite years
of Amazon successfully fighting
lawsuits against such rulings.
If passed, it could incentivize Amazon
and others to better police fake
reviews. Amazon owns the keys to that
data, and they they can do it.
I know they can. As Amazon continues
to help people stay safely at home,
the need for shoppers to trust the
reviews and order with confidence has
never been higher. It's really almost a
societal level issue of, you know,
can Amazon kind of keep control of
its systems and live up to the
dependency that we have on them?
And I think the you know, honestly,
they've been growing so fast that
they've been struggling with it.
On one hand, Amazon is
getting better about policing.
On the other hand, it's
a cat and mouse game.
You know, that probably
will never end.
