Amazon Fake Reviews
When I ordered a mobile phone screen protector for my Samsung S8 plus, I fired up the Amazon app and started to search for a well made, good fitting and most importantly a product that has top reviews. Now what if I told you that thousands upon thousands of reviews are fake. Would you still search the way you do, by selecting more than four stars.
Here’s how I found out about a Amazon’s fake reviews.
I found a nice screen protector for my phone and for £9.99, which seemed kind of an average price.
Taking a closer look....
When I received the product it was a flimsy not very well fitting phone protector which I thought was very unusual given that 411 people had all given the protector 100% review rating. so I went back to the app and looked at the reviews I wasn’t anything immediately that striked me, but on closer inspection I found a few usernames that had been used to a few times and then again and again. I clicked into the actual username and found out that in the same day they had posted 600 to 700 reviews primarily all of phone protectors. Some are listed below.
Now out of the 400 or so reviews I found 5 fake reviewers in just a few minutes, that had posted 3,156 reviews between them, and mostly in the same 48 hours (2 days).
If you have ever posted a review on Amazon it takes 48 hours to get accepted!
How does someone post 600 reviews on the same day?
More proof
And here’s some more proof. Same review but different usernames
Same person, same date same item….
Is Amazon Trustworthy?
The most worrying thing about these fake Amazon reviews:-
- Amazon is supposed to be trustworthy
- Amazon should have software that picks up this type of behaviour
- Only let people write reviews who have purchased the product they are writing about.
- Show how many people have sent the product back due to inferior quality or such like.
- Some people would never write a review, therefore if the customer keeps the product it shows they like it. This would reveal the amount sold also so this may be difficult for Amazon to accept and publish. eBay does publish this.
Many of these fake reviews are made by typing in hundreds of mini sentences, such as
Arrived well packaged, nice fit
Great product, would buy again
Bought for my sister, she loves it.then they add all of these into a database and then it spins the sentences to make hundreds of new reviews. This is called text spinning. It’s widely used in SEO to create new post blogs, that look new to Google but are in fact the same content but with new ways of saying things. Sometimes they get creative and add names and relationships as a variable that be changed. “My sister loved the case” now becomes “My Dad loves the case” and “My Nan loves the case”.
Amazon problems
The confusing thing is that I can’t do what the fake reviewers are doing! How do they submit hundreds of reviews by the same person on the same day?
This can only be done in two ways.
- The site has been secretly hacked and a backdoor has been created that is letting reviews in.
- The people that upload and accept the reviews have been compromised.