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FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

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Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#121

Post by kanox »

omouse wrote: post #46

FINALLY. "In addition, the order requires the defendants to notify Amazon, Inc. that they purchased Amazon reviews of their Quality Encapsulations Garcinia Cambogia capsules and to identify to Amazon the purchased reviews." Online reviews don't work without trust . Maintaining trust is done by Amazon in this case, but sometimes the job is too big, especially at this scale. Amazon needs better tools perhaps, but the j…

> FINALLY

Identities in comment sections have always been fake and anonymous and this is a good thing even if it results in occasional spam reviews. Legal action to enforce real IDs would make the internet worse.

I don't get it. I'd expect highly technical forums to value anonymity despite its drawbacks but I'm continuously disappointed.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#122

Post by yeutterg »

patrickxie wrote: post #49
duskwuff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or reviews that were transferred over from other products. Here's a case in point: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR Over 3000 reviews... most of them for products completely unrelated to the one on sale. I see reviews for a bicycle lamp, a phone screen protector, and a voltage converter. This seems like a bug. Surely Amazon shouldn't allow sellers to transfer product reviews over from other products?

it's not a bug, it's a exploit that fraudulent sellers are abusing. Since any seller can list on any listing. Some sellers will list their products on listings that are out of stock, and gain editing priviledges. Then they will edit the page to whatever other products they want, and merge it with a new listing they create. The end result is that they get a listing with hundreds or thousands of reviews. So unsuspectin…

This is a huge problem and major source of frustration for legitimate sellers on Amazon. I've had it happen and had to threaten legal action to get a fraudulent seller off of my listing.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#123

Post by asatterfield54 »

function_seven wrote: post #76
Guest10928391 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even off Amazon I feel it's becoming more and more difficult to find honest product reviews. For example, if I search on Google for "best umbrellas", every result on my front page is a website that is filled with Amazon affiliate links. I feel like none of them can be trusted because most have never touched any of the umbrellas, but they are just doing a top 10 list and rewriting opinions they read on Amazon. Of cour…

My solution to this has been to find a subreddit that's devoted to the product in question. If there is one, then I'll check the sidebar there, read through some posts, search for a few keywords. Basically spend 15 minutes researching. Reddit still has shills and astroturfs, but for a lot of niches they're often aggressively moderated out of the community. To go along with your umbrella example: Unfortunately /r/umbr…

This worked great for a while, but in the last few years reddit has become corporately dominated, regardless of moderation attempts (admins have removed moderators of certain subreddits to accomplish this, would guess based on the spend).

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#124

Post by manav »

I was worried for a moment since the company, "Cure Encapsulations" sounds familiar to the product line I frequently buy "Pure Encapsulations", luckily they are not the same.

What's interesting is that they only seem to have one product on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Ef2XH9, for which they are Amazon's top choice for the category. I wouldn't be surprised if one of their competitors made the complaint to the FCC.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#125

Post by [deleted] »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #109
hombre_fatal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were inflating my rating with 5-star reviews, I'd also want some 1-star reviews to complain about inconsequential things like "the coffee machine's cord was only 5 meters long" or "it was a bit louder than I expected, waking me up more than I wanted during my morning routine."

No you wouldn't. 1 star reviews will tank your average star rating and increase your NCX, which are far more important than the off chance someone reads your negative reviews closely. Unless you're selling 20 dollar bills for $5, you'll naturally get negative reviews. I've had to pull several products off Amazon because someone left an early, nonsense review that killed sales. (E.g. "Fast and easy" - 2 stars or "Work…

[deleted]

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#126

Post by orthecreedence »

inoop wrote: post #71
gav wrote: post #4

I still don't understand why Amazon has done so little to combat the plague of fake reviews. It seems like it's something that's going to blow up eventually and bite them. Along those lines: why do they still value reviews that aren't associated with a purchase? This is the logical first step.

Because it's a really, really hard problem to solve. The sheer scale of Amazon combined with razor thin margins and the fact that Amazon isn't even the selling party on most products means that they can't just throw a bunch of manual labor at the problem. It's a similar problem to YouTube still hosting tons of copyrighted material. Fraud is just super hard to fight.

It has to be somewhere between "not enough resources to fix" and "wow, we are making a ton of money off this 'problem!'"

There are so many patterns of low-hanging fruit:

"I haven't used it yet but it looks great"

"Seems ok"

"It's useful"

"The shipping was slow"

On any given product with any measure of popularity, probably 10-20% of reviews consist of those formats. One-word sentences with some kind of bland/useless assertion.

You're telling me the people who have massive clusters of machines and who resell tools for machine learning can't at least pick off the easiest 20% of shitty or fake reviews? Hell, give me two days, a few regexes, and a script and I'll do it myself. It's really that easy.

They just don't care.

That said, yes, beyond that lower-hanging fruit, the problem is insanely hard to tackle. But why not crowdsource it? People posting reviews saying "Sandy Hook was a liberal hoax" on a book about the Sandy Hook shooting could be flagged and marked for review.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#127

Post by treis »

duado wrote: post #100
sonnyblarney wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies collapse from within, they don't get trounced by competitors. Competitors come along with a new angle that seems innocuous at first, but then turns out to entail 'the thing people want'. It's very, very easy from an operational perspective to focus on the data-driven decision to sell crap, to ignore fake reviews etc. because that's what sells 'today'. But an A/B test (short view) does not capture users…

The alternative: Target.com. Once you try it, you’ll never go back. Amazon is still where I buy a wireless mouse, or a phone holder for my car, but big electronics come from B&H or Newegg, diapers and kids toys and baby food comes from Target.

>Newegg

They have gone the way of being a market and are not to be trusted. They robbed me out of $630 through a combination of fraud and my CC company being wankers.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#129

Post by joegahona »

ams6110 wrote: post #75
ABCLAW wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the affiliate links, but I mind dishonest or low quality churned reviews. When TV shopping, I used the reviews from https://www.rtings.com/ They pointed me to issues and concerns with TV quality, provided me with an understanding of the trade-offs at various price points, and then directed me to a TV model that I purchased and have been incredibly satisfied with. Maybe we need a reputable internet equiva…

Well? What's wrong with Consumer Reports? Sign up, pay for it, done. Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today. s/internet/web/

Does Consumer Reports provide any value over Wirecutter? The latter is free and has negligible display advertising.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#130

Post by trumped »

gav wrote: post #4

I still don't understand why Amazon has done so little to combat the plague of fake reviews. It seems like it's something that's going to blow up eventually and bite them. Along those lines: why do they still value reviews that aren't associated with a purchase? This is the logical first step.

Amazon even blocks legitimate negative reviews toward its own products... They will do whatever it takes to increase revenues.
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