Education
Amazon is putting down five-star fraud in the United Kingdom
Amazon 's top customers in the UK tend to have participated in bribery, leaving thousands of five-star scores in return for cash or free items. The business put out 20,000 product reviews after an inquiry by the Financial Times.
Justin Fryer, the number one Amazon customer in the UK, left a five-star rating every four hours on average in August, according to the FT report. Many of these reviews were done for items from unknown Chinese firms. Fryer appears to have sold the items back on eBay.
Scams like this usually start with social networks and chat applications like Telegram, where businesses can reach prospective users. When the link is made, the reviewer selects a free product, and then waits a couple of days to submit a five-star review. When the evaluation is written, they can receive a full refund and, at times, an additional charge.
Amazon has a specific rule against posting reviews in exchange for compensation of any kind (including free or discounted products) or on behalf of anyone else. However, nine of the top 10 reviewers in the UK appear to have broken that guideline and engaged in suspicious activity. Seven of the top 10 reviewers wrote the 20,000 reviews that were removed.
The company was alerted to Fryer 's activities at the beginning of August. At least one Amazon user reported the men's questionable ratings to CEO Jeff Bezos. The customer was told that the company will investigate, but it has not been able to take action until now.
Fryer insists that he was certainly not paying to post bogus five-star reviews, and he claims that his eBay ads for "unused" and "unopened" items were bonuses, according to the Times.
His activity, though, is not particularly alarming. Fake reviews have been a problem for Amazon for years.
In July, Markup found sellers engaging in a number of strategies aimed at exploiting their reviews on the website, including "review hijacking" where old reviews were added to new, mostly unrelated items.
During the coronavirus pandemic, when more people buy online, the epidemic has only escalated. In May, 58 percent of Amazon goods in the UK tended to have false ratings, according to Fakespot, a website that analyzes ranking manipulation. The scale of this scam is enormous, Saoud Khalifah, CEO of Fakespot, told the Financial Times. Amazon UK has a significantly higher number of false reviews than any other site.
In a statement sent to The Verge, Amazon spokesperson said that the company analyzes the responses before they go viral, reviewing 10 million submissions a week. We want Amazon consumers to buy happily trusting that the feedback they read are genuine and appropriate, they added. We have straightforward rules for users and distribution associates that forbid violations of our group services, and we revoke, bar, and take legal action against those that misuse these rules.
