Amazon continues its fight against fake reviews. The E-commerce giant has managed to stop the activity of three fake review buying and selling websites, thanks to a series of legal actions that it undertook at the beginning of the year.
The company founded by Jeff Bezos has reported in a statement that these pages are Fivestar Marketing, Matronex, and AppSally, which sold and bought fake reviews aimed at Amazon customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
Amazon’s action has also had consequences among users, since some 350,000 people who used those pages and were willing to write fake reviews no longer have the incentive to do so.
In Amazon’s opinion, “reviews are only useful if they accurately reflect the real experience of consumers with a product”, hence the fight against this type of false review is an ongoing effort by the e-commerce giant.
Amazon has also announced that it will take legal action against another major review buying and selling site: Hong Kong-based Extreme Rebate, which runs these fake reviews on Amazon stores in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada.
Amazon launched the review system in 1995 and since then clear rules against fraud and abuse have been established. Specifically, the company has 10,000 employees around the world dedicated to protecting its store from fraud and abuse, including the use of false or incentivized reviews.
To do this, Amazon relies on machine learning technology and a team of researchers who are experts in detecting, preventing, and removing such reviews before they can be shown to customers. According to the company, more than 99 percent of products viewed on the platform contain only authentic reviews.
Amazon has explained that despite their efforts, there are companies that have created an industry based on the systematic publication of false and misleading reviews. Specifically, through these pages, they ask consumers to write reviews in exchange for money, free products, or other incentives.