The company’s decision to pursue legal action comes at a time when fake reviews are becoming an increasingly bigger problem for Amazon. Since 2020, the company has reported over 10,000 fake review groups to Facebook, nearly half of which were removed by the social media platform for violating its terms of use. These removals helped Amazon stop 200,000 fake reviews from appearing on its marketplace.
One such group was called “Amazon Product Review,” and it had more than 43,000 members before Facebook removed it. Admins of these groups would often charge as much as $10 per fake review, while reviewers were promised free products.
Amazon currently employs some 12,000 people around the globe that are dedicated to preventing fraud and abuse on its platform, including those resulting from fake reviews. The company believes that this particular lawsuit will help it further clamp down on bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by fraudsters that its human and automated systems have not been able to identify so far.
“Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services. “Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”
