Nine out of the 10 top-rated Bluetooth headphones for sale on Amazon have been artificially boosted by unrelated Amazon reviews.

The reviews included one about a dangerous extension cable that supposedly caught fire, cuddly toys, and jigsaw puzzles, according to a new Which? Investigation.

Which? found that, in some cases, headphone rankings had been inflated by thousands of unrelated Amazon reviews, with none even mentioning headphones.

The research found that the unrelated products “leapfrogged” up the rankings as a result of ‘review merging’ abuse, the consumer watchdog said.

Review merging can be a legitimate way for sellers to manage their catalogue when they have a close variation of an existing product to add to an existing listing – such as the same product available in a different colour.

Which? did a search for Bluetooth headphones on sale on the Amazon website and arranged the results by ‘average customer reviews’ to “mimic how a consumer might shop when looking for the best-rated headphones on the site”.

Results found that Bose was the only established brand in the top 10 results that showed no signs of unrelated Amazon reviews. The others were “relatively unknown brands,” which did not appear to be sold on any other sites except for Amazon, Which? added.

“Doing this for unrelated products is against Amazon’s terms and conditions. It’s misleading and makes a product appear more popular than it is – and more appealing to consumers looking to make a quick purchase,” the watchdog said.

“Each of these unknown brands had reviews for entirely different products – including umbrellas, personalised jigsaw puzzles, bowls, jars, an extension lead and a keyboard desk tidy. We attempted to contact the sellers about our findings, but they did not respond,” Which? added.

On Amazon, sellers have the option to merge their product reviews, but some are increasingly seeking ways to merge reviews from other people’s listings as well.

Amazon’s seller forum currently has more than 50 threads discussing the problem of ‘review hijacking’, where people complain of having their product reviews ‘co-opted’ and ‘stolen’ by other sellers.

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A spokesperson for the tech giant said: “Amazon groups customer reviews for product variations like colour and size, and we have clear guardrails in place to prevent products from being incorrectly grouped, either due to human error or abuse.

“Our proactive measures detect and block the vast majority of abuse in our store automatically; however, we are disappointed when bad actors evade our systems, and we will continue to innovate and invest in our tools and processes.

“If we discover detail pages with incorrectly grouped reviews, we use these learnings to improve our prevention mechanisms. We have now taken appropriate enforcement action against the product listings and sellers in question.”

Fake reviews on website such as Amazon are a consistent problem, and have been prevalent for years, indicating the scale of the issue facing sellers and tech firms.

Back in 2019, a Which? investigation found that hundreds of tech products from ‘unknown’ brands for sale on Amazon were found to be filled with fake reviews.

Popular accessories such as smartwatches or headphones, largely made by unknown brands, had been given top reviews, many of these reviews were from unverified purchasers.

Additionally, in February 2021, Which? found that websites selling fake five-star Amazon reviews for as low as £5 were prevalent online. Ten websites were discovered that offered different packages of reviews, including bulk rates of up to 1000 reviews for £8,000.

To crack down on fake online reviews, new proposals were introduced in July last year by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng as part of sweeping new laws to combat the problem.

Reforms aim to boost competition and protect UK consumers from being ripped off, the UK Government said.

Under the new laws, the Competition and Markets Authority gained new powers to tackle subscription traps and fake reviews.

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