Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 429 posts

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#11

Post by bitsnbytes »

ncallaway wrote: post #5
coldcode wrote: post #4

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

It does affect the bottom line, though. Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page... Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related. With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads t…

I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints.

If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product.

I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date.

I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#13

Post by MattGaiser »

bombcar wrote: post #8
1-6 wrote: post #2

Some sellers simply give out free units for good reviews.

Lots of them are offering a gift card for a review to purchasers - which seems slightly less scammy as you’re unlikely to leave a good review of a crappy product for a $5 gift card.

All the gift card offers I have gotten have required a 5* review.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#14

Post by diveanon »

I haven't used amazon in years and this was largely the reason why.

After getting scammed a few times by products that seemed to have good reviews I decided to just keep shopping local instead where I can actually see the product and speak to human beings who used it.

Amazon will forever be the one stop shop for cheap counterfeit shit until they actually address these issues.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#16

Post by sombremesa »

ibraheemdev wrote: post #15

I recently got an email offering 50% off a seller's products if I left a good review. This is happening on all marketplaces, not just Amazon. The only way I see to truly solve the problem is only allowing verified buyers to leave a review.

Buyers also get brochures with their product offering gift cards and the like for 5-star reviews, though.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#17

Post by jiggawatts »

throwaway_1301 wrote: post #10
coldcode wrote: post #4

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake. Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem. You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 m…

This is a bit like arguing that Medicare for all is impossible in the United States because it is such a big country.

This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews.

You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect.

Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.

The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#18

Post by random5634 »

coldcode wrote: post #4

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

No kidding.

What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part.

* Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more.

* Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory).

* Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better

* Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way.

* Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked.

I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy.

Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#19

Post by afavour »

throwaway_1301 wrote: post #10
coldcode wrote: post #4

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake. Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem. You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 m…

I think it would be very difficult to detect these:

a) with 100% accuracy, and b) without involving humans at all

but I noticed the trend of fake Amazon reviews some time ago, and some patterns were very evident. I'd click on the profile of a five-star reviewer, more often than not every review they left was five stars. And every product I'd click through on also had a deluge of suspicious five star reviews. I even started scraping data into a graph database but then discovered that Amazon tries very hard to resist scraping attempts and gave up.

I think it would be very possible to set up some kind of basic pattern analysis along these lines. Clearly, merchants are buying positive reviews in bulk, so detecting sudden spikes in positive reviews and working out correlations with other product review dumps wouldn't be difficult. Once you've got a sense of it, you hand the data over to human investigators who take it the rest of the way. But despite its insane wealth, Amazon is clearly not interested in spending the money required to do that.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#20

Post by throwawayboise »

throwaway_1301 wrote: post #10
coldcode wrote: post #4

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake. Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem. You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 m…

Then admit you can't fix the problem and remove user reviews.
Post reply on HN