Amazon Sues Admins of 10,000+ Facebook Groups Over Fake Review Schemes
Amazon this week sued the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups who allegedly recruit people to write fake reviews in exchange for money or free products.
These social media groups, according to Amazon(Opens in a new window), pay folks to post "misleading" commentary online in Amazon stores in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan—a tactic that's prohibited by the e-commerce giant.
Facebook groups like "Amazon Product Review," which boasted more than 43,000 members before Meta removed it earlier this year, reportedly solicit false reviews for everything from car stereos to camera tripods, and evade detection by changing letters in searchable phrases.
Amazon plans to leverage the lawsuit's discovery process to "identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters that haven't already been detected by Amazon's advanced technology, expert investigators, and continuous monitoring."
Since 2020, Amazon has reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Facebook parent company Meta, at least half of which have been taken down over policy violations.
"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," Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon's VP of Selling Partner Services, said in a statement. "Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable."
Also this year, Amazon sued fake review brokers AppSally, Rebatest, and Extreme Rebate(Opens in a new window) in an effort to shut down operations, discourage misleading product reviews, and remove existing bogus posts. Amazon encourages anyone who suspects a
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