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Its Facebook vs Amazon as the retailer is not happy with fake review scams being run on the social network

Its Facebook vs Amazon as the retailer is not happy with fake review scams being run on the social network
Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

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Amazon reviews play a big part in the buying decisions of millions of shoppers every day. They add legitimacy to marketing claims and allow buyers to lean on real-world experience of how they products they are looking at really are. Anything that could harm the legitimacy of fake reviews then will be a big deal for Amazon as if customers feel they can trust them less, they may not feel comfortable enough to hit the buy button. It should be no surprise then that Amazon is moving against more than 10,000 Facebook Group admins who have been running massive fake Amazon review scams.

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Amazon has released a press release announcing it has filed legal action against fake review brokers on over 10,000 Facebook groups. The move is partly designed to help the e-commerce giant identify fake reviews on its site so that the legal team can then move to get them taken down.

In the press release, Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services said:

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

In one of the groups, brazenly called Amazon Product Review, more than 43,000 members were involved in posting fake reviews to Amazon in exchange for free products. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has since taken the group down, but Amazon’s investigations found that the group’s admins were attempting to the hide group’s activity in order to avoid detection by the social network.

Amazon classes fake reviews as fraud and it is the company’s 12,000-strong anti-fraud workforce that is responsible for stopping fake reviews from getting onto the site. The team has made over 10,000 reports to Facebook about fake reviews, yet the social network has only acted on about half of them.

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Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney is a news reporter for Softonic, keeping readers up to date on everything affecting their favorite apps and programs. His beat includes social media apps and sites like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat. Patrick also covers antivirus and security issues, web browsers, the full Google suite of apps and programs, and operating systems like Windows, iOS, and Android.

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