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Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

theguardian.com

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Re: Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

#31

Post by plink »

amelius wrote: post #12
plink wrote: post #2

I feel unaffected by such fake reviews as the only ones I ascribe much value to are the negative ones. Also, I've extremely curtailed any purchasing on Amazon as I've come to perceive the majority of their marketplace to be a degenerative crap house.

> I feel unaffected by such fake reviews as the only ones I ascribe much value to are the negative ones. I suppose fake review factories can be hired just as well to make the competition look bad ...

Yes, that is food for thought. Although the Amazon situation doesn't fit the fake-yelp-reviews-about-a-hotel scenario because one's Amazon competitors are nearly infinite and constantly changing, whereas there are only a geographically limited number of restaurant or hotel competitors to pillory.

Re: Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

#32

Post by tyfon »

bingbingo wrote: post #4

Shit like this is what made me lose confidence in Amazon and I stopped my prime subscription. My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart…

I wonder how this is in Europe where the buyer can get very hefty fines for buying counterfeit goods and even heftier fines for bringing said goods across borders.

Personally I don't shop at Amazon so I don't know if it's a problem here.

Re: Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

#33

Post by joering2 »

cs702 wrote: post #25

Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Important to mention: ugly in terms of i assume illegality of this in many countries. I’m also convinced there are many countries when something like this is either fully legal or not covered by law this or another way. So “ugly ugly ugly” but technically and legally the caravan goes on.

Re: Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

#34

Post by [deleted] »

astrodust wrote: post #30
cs702 wrote: post #25

Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

The only way to describe this is as an unfortunate inevitability of review systems as a whole.

[deleted]

Re: Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

#36

Post by toss1 »

astrodust wrote: post #30
cs702 wrote: post #25

Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

The only way to describe this is as an unfortunate inevitability of review systems as a whole.

I'd say of unmoderated (or poorly moderated) review systems. E.g., we don't see this on Angie's List or Houzz.

I've found that the only way to get useful information out of most Amazon reviews is to look at the 1- & 2-stars, trying to filter out the fake competitor hits, and see if there are any consistent issues that aren't DEU issues. Then look at the 3- & 4-stars and see what seems to be good. That said, I expect it'll only be a matter of time until this strategy is no good.

Re: Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

#37

Post by CamperBob2 »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #28
walrus01 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon customer service is now quite terrible. Anecdote: I know somebody who has an office that is literally within a 2 block radius of Amazon HQ in Seattle (the new Doppler and Day One buildings). Getting Amazon's third party delivery contractors to successfully deliver to their office suite door, in a high-rise office tower, has been an amazing struggle. Deliveries get sent back as "rejected" all the time, when the…

This reminds me a bit of my own giant techco bugbear: for the longest time, Google Maps mishandled my home address - literally across the street from their local office - because it didn't recognize the 1/2 in the house number. It would direct users to 1 Fake St rather than N 1/2 Fake St.

To be fair, I imagine a lot of systems don't handle noninteger house numbers very robustly. That "1/2" business just seems like asking for trouble.

The best solution might be to convince your building landlord or management to rename the units as 1 Fake Street Unit A and Unit B, or something like that. Assuming they don't have to fight City Hall to make that happen, they might be willing to help.

Re: Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

#39

Post by [deleted] »

tyfon wrote: post #32
bingbingo wrote: post #4

Shit like this is what made me lose confidence in Amazon and I stopped my prime subscription. My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart…

I wonder how this is in Europe where the buyer can get very hefty fines for buying counterfeit goods and even heftier fines for bringing said goods across borders. Personally I don't shop at Amazon so I don't know if it's a problem here.

[deleted]

Re: Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

#40

Post by walrus01 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #37
tomjakubowski wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me a bit of my own giant techco bugbear: for the longest time, Google Maps mishandled my home address - literally across the street from their local office - because it didn't recognize the 1/2 in the house number. It would direct users to 1 Fake St rather than N 1/2 Fake St.

To be fair, I imagine a lot of systems don't handle noninteger house numbers very robustly. That "1/2" business just seems like asking for trouble. The best solution might be to convince your building landlord or management to rename the units as 1 Fake Street Unit A and Unit B, or something like that. Assuming they don't have to fight City Hall to make that happen, they might be willing to help.

You would think, however, that the "1/2" works fine in the text field used for a standard North American address... At least with Amazon and 99% of ecommerce sites there's two separate freeform text entry fields for street address. It's not like these are fields that require a precise integer.

This should enable the actual human making the delivery to see the same thing printed on the label, and visually match it to whatever is labeled "1/2" on the building.

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