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.
This story is kind of old news - anyone on chat groups who speaks chinese knows about these. The thing is - chinese nationals using ingenuity to trick money out of americans, that's a recurring theme in the modern world.
Fake reviews aren't "ingenuity," they're dishonesty and fraud that exploit a high-trust culture.
High-trust cultures are valuable, hard to create, and easy to destroy. The reaction to all this online review fraud is going to be default mistrust and wasted effort by consumers who are going to be forced to constantly second-guessing information or get scammed.