Amazon Reviews Scam

Amazon reviews scam is a very very real problem. So don’t be surprised if the next time you buy something from Amazon thinking you’ve found gold, when it arrives, it turns out to be junk.

Review scams have been going on for a long time. As soon as sellers realized that the star ratings have a big impact on whether or not people will buy a product, many of them have been trying to game the system by inflating their stars.

There are many ways that a vendor carries out these nefarious review scams. One way is to just do it themselves. If a vendor has sufficient technical skills they use say a VPN to get a unique IP address. Then they can use some sort of private browsers. WIth that, they can create many Amazon accounts to write favourable reviews for their own products. This method takes time though, as I am sure you can imagine. And most people just opt to outsource this shady practice! These people they outsource to use many tools and bots to make fake reviews.

Now, there are many places that offer to inflate Amazon reviews! And they are not expensive at all. In fact, I did a quick google search for “buy amazon reviews” and just with that search term and 10 minutes of research time, I was able to find no less than ten vendors who I can quickly pay. Then within hours, or days, or a week or so, get the totally desired totally dishonest and insincere review! And for most of them you can get started with as little as ten dollars!

And you know I also found cool, or actually uncool features, such as paying a little extra to make the reviews stick. Meaning if the “fake” reviews disappear for whatever reason, the vendor will replace it with a new review that’s just as fake if not faker! Another novel offering I found is that you can sign up and earn credits! Yes, there’s a function on some of the sites I found where you can go and make fake reviews and earn review credits which can then be used to get fake reviews for yourself! Wow! If this was for doing some good deeds it would actually be a good concept!

Recently, Amazon does seem to go on the offensive on these review scams. In what a New York Times article called “Amazon’s Great Purge”, many big amazon sellers seem to have gotten kicked out due to excessive review scams! Now these are mostly sellers from China with names like Mpow and Aukey and to be honest if you weren’t looking closely you wouldn’t have noticed them being gone. But according to the article they were big sellers and moved a lot of items. And them getting kicked out because they were inflating their star rating points to a good sign that Amazon is cleaning things up. By the way, Amazon didn’t announce the actual reason these sellers were kicked out was because of review scams, but apparently dependable sources say so. So we shall believe them!

So can we trust reviews since a lot of them seem to be fake?

Well yes and no. The best thing to do is to learn to spot fake reviews. There are many sources that teach you how to do that - which you can easily find, and I will link to some of them in the description as well. Remember, there are also many genuine and useful reviews!

First thing to keep in mind is that negative reviews are almost always genuine! So look at those and they should be helpful to you in some way.

Always keep in mind though that what one person thinks of as good or bad won’t be the same from person to person. So take that into consideration when reading reviews.

Another thing to note is that the stars aren’t standardized. What I mean is while five stars being great seems to be universal, what 3 or 2 or 1 star means just isn’t the same for everyone. Some people give three stars to what they think is terrible while for others that honor goes to the 1 star. So keep that in mind too.

When it comes down to it, I guess take everything with a grain of salt.

What’s important to note is that most of the time, purchases made from Amazon and actually any other reputable sellers turns out just fine. Most of the time, sellers just inflate their ratings in order to just get their product in front of people. They still care about their actual customer’s experience and want it to be good! After all, sellers really do want repeat customers and they do know that a single negative review has more effects than many many positive ones. But then once in a while, you really do get junk instead of gold. So there’s that. Just like everything in life, luck does play a part, I guess!