From counterfeit goods to fake N-95 masks, price gouging to disappearing
orders, shoppers on Amazon have a growing need to proceed with caution
before clicking Buy Now.
Since Amazon's early days, reviews are the one big metric customers rely on
to determine the quality and authenticity of a product.
Turns out many of those reviews can't be trusted.
The review system as of today is broken.
Before the pandemic, the usual benchmark around our average fake reviews
was 30%.
The norm has now become close to 35%, 40%.
In recent years, thousands of fake reviews have flooded Amazon and Walmart,
eBay and others, just as sales numbers have skyrocketed.
And as shoppers stay home, online orders are up 57% since the same time
last year and the number of reviews is up 76%.
There's an element where you simply want to trust those stars and you want
to trust the numbers, because if you can't trust that, how do you know
what you're buying? From Facebook groups where bad actors solicit paid
positive reviews to bots and click farms that upvote negative reviews to
take out the competition, fake reviews have boosted sales of unsafe
products, caused huge brands to sever ties with Amazon and hurt business
for legitimate sellers.
We can't compete. We can't surface our products that are new and innovative
and truly valuable to consumers because other products that aren't so
great are playing this game of review manipulation.
We decided to find out why fake reviews have infiltrated Amazon, how
customers can spot an unreliable review, and what the trillion dollar
company and others are doing to stop them.
One big draw over competitors like Walmart, Target and eBay is that
Amazon's listings often have hundreds or even thousands of reviews instead
of just a handful. It's so easy, no matter what site you're on, to simply
say the most reviews with the most stars means the most level of
happiness. It's just simply not the case.
If those Amazon customers aren't really customers or if they're an
organization of paid individuals who just sit there and go five star, five
star, five star, that doesn't really tell me anything meaningful about the
product. Review software company Bazaarvoice did a study of 10,000
consumers at the end of last year.
42% of consumers are saying that fake reviews from the brand itself would
cause them to lose trust.
82% of those consumers are saying that would cause them to never buy that
brand again. The problem is fake and real reviews are getting harder to
tell apart. When you have no reason to think it's a fake review, that's
when the consumer's in the most danger.
And as shoppers increasingly turn online for things they'd normally want to
shop for in person, like the nursing bras made by Simple Wishes, there's a
higher chance of serious repercussions from the purchase of a counterfeit
or low quality product.
And if the product's Amazon page is filled with fake positive reviews,
shoppers won't know to steer clear.
We see reviews of people saying that their breast tissue was torn and
irritated and bleeding because of irritating seams.
And, you know, we see things like this or like this product broke or it
tore after I wore it three times.
You see those real reviews surface and then all of a sudden there'll just
be massive positive reviews.
A high rating can also trigger the coveted Amazon's Choice badge, although
Amazon did say it will delete the badge if a product isn't adhering to
policy. Amazon prohibits any attempt to manipulate reviews and told CNBC
it will suspend, ban and take legal action against those who violate these
policies. For any review, even the most genuine, it always is worth asking
why is someone writing that review?
What is the incentive to write that review?
Free products and payment are increasingly common incentives.
Sellers solicit pay-for-play reviews through popular Twitter accounts and
Facebook groups with thousands of members.
So I joined some of these groups just to kind of poke around.
And the first groups I joined, there were five different postings from our
competitor asking for a review.
I felt like I just struck gold finding my competitor there, reported it to
Amazon and nothing happened.
UCLA and USC released a study in July that found more than 20 fake review
related Facebook groups with an average of 16,000 members.
In more than 560 postings each day, sellers offered a refund or payment
for a positive review, usually around $6.
Amazon told CNBC it works with social media sites to report bad actors who
are cultivating abusive reviews outside our store.
And we've sued thousands of bad actors for attempting to abuse our reviews
systems. The FTC requires reviewers to disclose any payment or connection
to the product being reviewed.
On some sites like Fiverr and Freelancer, users get around this by
advertising marketing services, a thinly veiled reference to pay-for-play
reviews. There's also the more direct approach where sellers include a
note inside a package asking for a review in exchange for a discount or
other compensation. It's hard to keep on top of five million sellers and
600 million products.
There's always a few bad seeds in the mix, and it's the bad seeds that get
the attention. It's not that Amazon's sitting back doing nothing.
It's that the scope of what we're dealing with is so vast.
There are legitimate paid reviewer programs like Amazon Vine, Early
Reviewer and Amazon Associates, which require reviewers to disclose that
they've received a product for free in exchange for what's supposed to be
an honest review. But Amazon has little way to detect a compensated review
when deals are made outside these programs.
There's a Velcro panel in the back so you can constantly reset the size and
it's always the proper support.
Sisters Joy Kosak and Debra Abbaszadeh designed a new type of hands-free
pumping bra and started selling it on Amazon in 2009, where sales took off
quickly. But for the past three years, sales have been flat, dropping off
after Amazon started to openly court Chinese sellers to join its
marketplace. Cheaper bras with an exceptionally similar design to theirs
started popping up, getting hundreds of five star ratings seemingly
overnight. When that happened, we saw a pretty immediate race to the
bottom in terms of pricing.
The sisters have been tracking review activity on listings from competitors
like Momcozy and sharing the data with Amazon.
Our best seller, where we used to be number 25 in baby, we over the past
ten years of being on Amazon, we have collected a little more than 10,000
reviews. It took them a couple of months to to increase by 4,000.
Big brands like Nike and Birkenstock have been so burned by competitors
selling knockoffs with thousands of five star reviews that they stopped
selling on Amazon altogether.
Although Nike's landing page still appears active on Amazon, the items
there are being sold by third-party sellers.
They're fake, they're counterfeit.
They're either bought from Alibaba or eBay and then they're resold on
Amazon. So a lot of these sellers are actually ruining Nike's reputation
and they're putting in all the reviews into the official listing for Nike.
At times, big brands themselves are soliciting fake reviews.
Last year, for example, skincare brand Sunday Riley settled with the FTC
after it was caught encouraging employees to post fake reviews on
Sephora.com. On Amazon if you're not doing some sort of, you know, tricky
technique, it's at least one hundred orders for each review that you get.
Bernie Thompson sells about 120 consumer electronics products on Amazon
from his warehouse outside Seattle.
Competitors have tried to undermine his sales with fake review tactics.
We've had people take our most negative review, the one that's most
embarrassing, and we've had competitors vote up those negative reviews.
Let's say your competitor has a one-star review on the first page, you can
buy 100 helpful votes.
When they're considered most helpful, they show up at the top of the
results. And so you can really harm your competitors by doing that.
That helpful box can easily be clipped by bots instead of humans or by
click farms overseas.
The ones that I've been contacted by are all in Bangladesh, India, I think
one of them, Vietnam.
They have computers and they've got fake accounts and they basically turned
in this whole system where they go in and just click on "helpful" once and
then log into a different account and then click on "helpful" again and so
on to where you can just pay for basically taking down your competitors.
Bots are also getting better at generating convincing written reviews.
We actually see a lot of these fake review farms leveraging open source
projects from these behemoths, such as Google, Open AI, multibillion
dollar research firms and leveraging it to produce fraud.
And by this case, we're producing human like text that looks like really
realistic. Amazon's own algorithms do usually detect these patterns and
remove them within weeks.
Amazon says we're going to wait 30 days and if we detect that there's
enough fake reviews, we'll pull back those fake reviews.
The problem is, during that 30 day policing period, the product can
generate a whole lot of sales that it didn't otherwise deserve.
In 2019, Amazon changed its review system so customers can leave a simple
star rating with one click instead of a full written review.
This tool that Amazon put out there to make it easier for consumers to give
real feedback has actually made it easier for the scammers to elevate
their star rating, just the volume, because now all they have to do is say
all you have to do is click a button.
No one can tell who left the rating.
You will not see those ratings as a list of authors on the bottom of the
page. And we see products with thousands of ratings that have no body,
text body attached to them.
While a rating can only be left by someone who bought the product, Amazon
allows reviews from anyone even if they haven't made a purchase.
We see certain categories have over 90% of the reviews on the product are
unverified. And when you look at them, it just looks like a flood of bot
reviews. What Amazon does is they give different weights to different
kinds of reviews and so a verified purchase review will have more of a
weight than someone who wasn't verified.
But the intention is that you could have bought it at Walmart and want to
review it. You could have bought it somewhere else and want to review it.
And then there's a slew of new tricks popping up from bogus seller accounts
to mysterious free Amazon packages appearing on people's doorsteps.
In one tactic known as Review Highjacking, a seller takes over a once
popular listing. So you'd have these crazy situations where, you know, our
product was a USB hub but we had to discontinue it.
And somebody's selling like women's eyelashes would take over that product,
change the picture to women's eyelashes, change all the text.
The reviews would show these 2,000 positive reviews.
But if you'd read the reviews, they're not about eyelashes.
They're about a USB hub.
Another recent tactic involves seed packets from China showing up at
hundreds of people's houses who don't know where they came from.
The Better Business Bureau warns that the scam, often called Brushing,
means the seller is using the seeds to generate fake Amazon orders tied to
U.S. addresses. Then they can write fake verified reviews about themselves
falsely inflating their seller rating.
Then there's sock puppet reviews, which are bogus accounts created by a
seller to write positive reviews on their own products.
Sellers can also hack into a customer's Amazon account and post a positive
review from there without the customer ever knowing.
And they're all new products that are getting reviews at an amazing rate.
It's just not, it's not believable.
With so many ways to create realistic fake reviews, some start-ups have
developed ways to detect them.
Fakespot is one of these.
Fakespot launched a new Chrome plugin in May that has a quarter million
downloads so far. It analyzes the credibility of a listing's reviews and
gives it a grade from A to F.
The Fakespot Guard will actually catch these sellers dynamically as you're
browsing Amazon.
And we will offer you an alternative seller that is authentic and genuine
that we've seen before that has high customer satisfaction.
Other online tools that customers can use to check the credibility of
Amazon reviews include ReconBob, ReviewMeta, the Review Index and Review
Skeptic. Shoppers willing to spend time to vet their purchases can
manually spot fake reviews, too.
The number one way consumers tell us they identify a fake review are
multiple reviews with the same language in them.
So they're basically looking for patterns in the reviews.
The second most important way is reviews that are not actually about the
product. The third is poor grammar and misspellings.
And the fourth, and I actually think this is one of the more important ones
is overwhelming number of five-star positive reviews.
If a product only has two or three reviews that it's gathered over a long
period of time and those two or three reviews look pretty good, consumers
actually need to give kind of more trust to a product like that.
Clearly, that brand and that manufacturer, they're not gaming anything.
If you do spot a fake review, Amazon encourages customers to use the report
button next to each review.
But whether Amazon will take any action after fake reviews are reported is
a different question. We go down these rabbit hole that take a lot of time
to look for this information and then we share it with Amazon and nothing
happens. And it's just exhausting.
After CNBC brought Simple Wishes' complaints to Amazon, months after it was
first informed of the illegitimate reviews, Amazon said, "We've taken
appropriate action on these accounts." Amazon told CNBC it uses powerful
machine learning tools and skilled investigators to analyze over ten
million review submissions weekly, aiming to stop abusive reviews before
they're ever published. Getting Amazon to actually do investigations,
quite frankly, they don't have enough investigators to do all the possible
investigations needed.
When I was at Amazon, there was a time when Amazon had about 20
investigators for the whole United States.
There was over a million sellers on Amazon at the time and there were 20
investigators. In an unprecedented move, Amazon hosted a virtual
conference earlier this month to give tips and listen to concerns from its
third party sellers, who make up 58% of Amazon's e-commerce business.
When it comes to outside regulation, fake reviews are prohibited by the
FTC, but it's a complex issue.
Where you can leave a review and you receive some kind of compensation, you
need to put in a disclaimer.
And that's consumer law.
That's been around for a while.
But there are different ways that this is now being gamed.
There is no law attached to ratings where you can leave them without text.
Targets and Walmart, they are they are held to a higher standard.
They have to vet products that they put on their shelves or through their
e-commerce platform because they are liable.
And that's the huge difference here.
Unless Amazon is purchasing the product from the seller as a wholesale
purchaser and they are representing as the seller, they have zero
liability. And that's frightening.
Last year for the first time, the FTC prosecuted a company for fake reviews
on Amazon. The inflated reviews were for a weight loss supplement that's
made with a plant that can cause acute liver failure.
You can already see the FTC becoming more interested in reviews.
They treat reviews as a form of advertising because of the influence that
it has on us as shoppers.
Now, Amazon supports a California Assembly bill that would subject online
marketplaces to the same product liability requirements as
brick-and-mortar retailers, despite years of Amazon successfully fighting
lawsuits against such rulings.
If passed, it could incentivize Amazon and others to better police fake
reviews. Amazon owns the keys to that data, and they they can do it.
I know they can. As Amazon continues to help people stay safely at home,
the need for shoppers to trust the reviews and order with confidence has
never been higher. It's really almost a societal level issue of, you know,
can Amazon kind of keep control of its systems and live up to the
dependency that we have on them?
And I think the you know, honestly, they've been growing so fast that
they've been struggling with it.
On one hand, Amazon is getting better about policing.
On the other hand, it's a cat and mouse game.
You know, that probably will never end.