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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

#71

Post by Spooky23 »

RileyJames wrote: post #63
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…

Regarding a counterfeit product, is the return period relevant? It’s a case of fraud. It seems it would be an open and shut case for a small claim court, if they didn’t provide a refund.

You can pursue chargebacks with the credit card as well. I’ve been told that they will eventually banish you if you do it often.

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

#72

Post by xbkingx »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #48
walrus01 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's not like these are fields that require a precise integer. If you are treating the street address as more than a string something is wrong. Its supposed to be a string by design unless you are trying to be efficient by storing ints as ints but then you shouldnt be evaluating them from user input and if you are... Treat it as a raw string.

There's probably more to it than that.

With some knowledge of the ordering scheme, you can determine relative locations and route drivers without storing every address on a street. I think it's very easy to imagine a cases where have "1/3" as your street number could cause problems (0.33333333... out of memory) or just dealing with floating point conversion and typing can lead to seemingly random bugs.

Accepting non-integers should be fine, as long as there's no delimiter or reversions to numbers ( e.g.- 321A Main St.), but I could see it being a problem with delimiters. It greatly expands the solution space for recognition tasks. Is 321 N Main Street: 321 Main St. Unit N or 321 North Main St? Is 321/A Main St: 321 Main St Unit A, 321-A(ths) Main St, 32 Main St. Unit 1 or A, 3214 Main St (A/4 character recognition failure), 321 Main St (A is escaped by /), 321 AMAIN St., 32 Main St Unit VA.

Where does it switch from a unit number to an address? 321A21B Main St could be read at least a dozen different ways, especially if we allow for recognition errors. Can't we at least agree that a physical building has an integer value and anything inside the building becomes a separate field (Unit, Suite, Floor, Cabana Room, etc)? No one's pumping money into post office modernization and we're not going to see Unicode or Emoji address support, so can't we simply agree on a few rules?

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

#73

Post by DominikPeters »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #27

Couldn't you post a five star review, get reimbursed, and then change your review to an honest one? Asking for a friend.

The offers on those Facebook groups all seem to ask for amazon profile name before agreeing on the deal, to check your reviewing history. I doubt your proposed scheme would be long-lived.

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

#74

Post by gesman »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #70

I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full-time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn’t do anything against them on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so (but this is one of many Fakespot metrics). I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every pro…

Well said.

Amazon is either going to clean their house or someone is going to do it for them.

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

#75

Post by kaffee »

Let's not forget that these fake reviews are being paid for. That's clearly better than non-paid-for fake reviews. That is, there's some friction for the malicious actors.

Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.

This is all to say that it looks like Amazon and others (e.g., Steam) are doing the right thing in requiring a verified purchase in order to leave a review.

But it does seem like there's an easy improvement that Amazon could make: offer amnesty to people who report (after the fact) that they left a fake review. The review would be marked internally as fake (and this would impact rankings, etc.) but the vendor would be none the wiser.

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

#76

Post by kibwen »

dunkelheit wrote: post #26
dragontamer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met a family member (like 2nd cousin or further away) at some wedding a few years ago. I only talked to him once, but he was very clear about this situation. He owned a hotel, and was trying to track down the writers of bad reviews on Yelp. Primarily, as the owner of the hotel, it was his job to find out what's wrong about the hotel and improve it. But he started to investigate some of the 1-star reviews, and came…

A heuristic that I've used quite a lot recently is to look at three-star reviews and see if the reviewer's gripes are relevant to me. Works quite well, but I guess it is only a matter of time and we'll soon start seeing fake three-star reviews.

And eventually when people start to favor two and four star reviews those will start being gamed as well, and then, just like in a math problem where all the variables magically cancel out, all the fake reviews will exist in perfect equilibrium and average review scores will reflect only the real reviews! Genius!

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

#77

Post by nerdponx »

drb91 wrote: post #62
dcbadacd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say this is exactly where some kind of web of trust could work. Meaning that everyone is shown the reviews of their added family members, their trusted people (with less weight) and so on and on. If they betray the trust the system could even have a "trust less" button. It'd actually give people the ability to choose who they trust.

Are you kidding? People I know have TERRIBLE judgement when it comes to products. Who builds trust based on that characteristic?

But a web of trust based on, "I like this reviwer, so I trust who they trust" seems reasonable.

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

#78

Post by delfinom »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #70

I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full-time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn’t do anything against them on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so (but this is one of many Fakespot metrics). I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every pro…

Amazon rolled out the carpet for counterfeit when they mixed their inventory with seller inventory. Do not buy common automotive parts from Amazon. Really good chance you will get a knockoff part.

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

#79

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

electriclove wrote: post #64

Fakespot.com

Reposting a comment I left elsewhere:

There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat people.

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