A lawsuit filed by Amazon this week in Seattle illustrates the challenge of combatting fake reviews. The company is seeking a court order and financial penalties against the operators of a site called “Nice Discount,” alleging that they engaged in a scheme to encourage fraudulent product reviews.
The suit, filed Monday in King County Superior Court, alleges that the site offered cash back for reviews left by those who signed up for its “Product Tester Club.”
In reality, Amazon says, no product testing ever happened.
“Instead, Amazon’s investigation indicates that Defendants only provided promised cash back to reviewers if the reviewers left positive reviews, ratings, and feedback for bad actors,” the suit alleges. “[I]f a reviewer left a negative review, negative rating, or negative feedback, Defendants withheld the payment and instead would contact the reviewer to encourage them to change their review, rating, or feedback to a positive one.”
But the names of the site’s operators are unknown, according to the suit, and the site has already disappeared from its former url at nicediscount.net.
Through May of this year, Amazon says it filed 94 lawsuits against fake review operators around the world, which already exceeds the number filed by the company last year.
It’s the legal equivalent of swatting at flies.
Amazon VP Dharmesh Mehta, who leads the company’s Worldwide Selling Partner Services program, stressed the need for more coordination and information-sharing among key industry players and law enforcement in a post published this morning.
He also called for clearer enforcement authority and government funding to pursue brokers of fake reviews, and more vigilance from social media platforms.
“While our efforts with third-party services have resulted in better and faster responses to our takedown requests from some services providers, all sites that could be used to facilitate this illicit activity should have robust notice and takedown processes that are effective and fast,” Mehta wrote, in part.
Amazon’s public appeal comes as AI begins to change the game for product reviews, making it easier to produce fake reviews and flood e-commerce sites with them.
The company uses a variety of technical tools to identify and take down fake reviews, saying that it blocked more than 200 million suspected fakes last year.
Amazon has separately started testing the use of AI to summarize product reviews on its e-commerce site, as reported by CNBC on Monday evening.
