Amazon plans to shame 1,100 fake reviewers in court
AMAZON is suing more than 1,000 fake reviewers in an attempt to shame them publicly for misleading customers.
Court documents filed in the US last week show that Amazon is suing 1,114 people who allegedly left bogus reviews on its website.
The world’s biggest online marketplace wants the professional review writers, who are paid to leave bogus feedback online, to be stripped of their anonymity and made to pay damages.
It claims they are responsible for ‘misleading Amazon’s customers and tarnishing Amazon’s brand for their own profit and the profit of a handful of dishonest sellers and manufacturers’.
It is believed this is the first time a company has acted against its own reviewers on this scale. And if it is successful, Amazon could begin action against authors and other sellers who took advantage of the scam.
Amazon filed its legal complaint in Washington state, where it has its headquarters. All the defendants are alleged to have advertised f ake review writing services on a freelancing website, Fiverr.
The bogus reviewers are, for now, anonymous, but their Fiverr account names are listed on the complaint.
The defendants were caught after Amazon investigators posed as potential customers on the site.
The firm said its investigation f ound many of the defendants requested text f rom the sellers f or the reviews. The company sued a number of websites in April for selling false reviews.
The case adds to growing concerns over the legitimacy of online feedback. Travel website Tripadvisor has been dogged by controversy over fake reviews. Hoteliers and restaurateurs argue that negative postings are often written by rival businesses to mislead potential customers.
On Saturday t he Mail revealed how an industry had grown up dedicated to generating bogus reviews for cash.
A reporter who went on Fiverr seeking reviews for a holiday cottage he was mar- keting i n Scotland was offered fake reviews for as little as £3.50.
And l ast week, bogus reviewers were exposed after The Sunday Times published a ghostwritten e-book and paid them to take it to the top of the gardening and horticulture best sellers section on Amazon UK’s Kindle store. Fake reviewers charged £56 to post positive feedback about Everything Bonsai!, which was poorly-produced. An Amazon spokesman said: ‘ Our goal is to make reviews as useful as possible f or customers. We use a number of mechanisms to detect and remove the small fraction of reviews that violate our guidelines, and we terminate accounts.’ ÷This year is expected to be the busiest ever for UK delivery drivers, according to internet retail body Imrg. It predicts that 860million parcels will be sent to our doors, up from 600million in 2012 because of the sharp rise in online shopping.
‘Tarnishing the brand for profit’