In a bid to curb fake reviews, Amazon is taking legal action against the administrators of over 10,000 Facebook Groups.

The groups are accused of being behind fake review campaigns, according to the e-commerce giant. They offer campaigns of reviews, boosting the prominence of sellers’ products, in exchange for money or free products.

Under the scheme, members of the groups would purchase items, leave reviews, and then the seller would refund the item.

The reviews are placed on Amazon marketplaces in the UK, US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan.

According to Amazon, it will use information discovered in the lawsuit to identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters that haven’t already been detected.

One of the groups, dubbed Amazon Product Review, had 43,000 members before it was removed by Facebook’s parent company, Meta.

To evade Facebook’s filters, the fake review groups use coded key phrases to escape detection. They would remove letters from phrases, turning ‘refund after review’ into ‘r*fnd aftr r*vew’, for example.

“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,” said Amazon Vice-president of Selling Partner Services Dharmesh Mehta.

“Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”

Amazon has long struggled with the problem of fake reviews. Back in 2019, a Which? report found thousands of reviews on devices such as headphones and smartwatches, generally from unknown brands, that had all the hallmarks of being fraudulent.

Two years later, the problem still plagued Amazon. Another Which? investigation found websites selling fake five-star Amazon reviews for as low as £5. Among the services offered were bulk rates, loyalty schemes and reviews in return for free products.

Amazon has worked to try and curb fake reviews, removing them and taking action against those involved in the abuse.

According to the company, it has more than 12,000 employees around the world dedicated to protecting its stores from fraud and abuse, including fake reviews.

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Furthermore, a dedicated team investigates fake review schemes on social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and regularly reports the abusive groups to those companies.

It claims to have reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Meta since 2020. Of these, Meta has taken down more than half of the groups for policy violations and continues to investigate others.

However, many of the fake review providers masquerade as legitimate services. Sellers may pay to boost the prominence of their products on Amazon searches, completely unaware that the service they’re buying uses fake reviews.

New laws have been put forth by the UK Government to help stop fake reviews. These would make it automatically illegal to pay someone to write, or host, a fake review.

Amazon called for greater public-private partnership, including collaboration between the affected companies, social media sites, and law enforcement to permanently end fake reviews.

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