The Better Business Bureau allows consumers to post reviews and file complaints against businesses, and now the BBB has partnered with one of those companies to crack down on fake reviews: Amazon announced Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit with the BBB against ReviewServiceUSA.com.
“Website owners and operators attempted to sell fake positive reviews to unscrupulous actors for inclusion on Amazon product listing pages and BBB business profile pages,” Amazon said in a statement.
“But a corrupt 'fake review broker' industry has emerged, with fraudulent companies promoting fake reviews to mislead consumers. These fake reviews undermine trust in the review experience and harm customers and sellers alike. Amazon is investing significant resources to aggressively stop fake reviews, including using machine learning models and expert investigators to verify that all reviews in our store are genuine, and taking legal action against fake review brokers around the world to root out fake reviews.”
In April, Amazon published the following video on YouTube explaining the technology behind their fake review detection system:
The video explains that all Amazon reviews undergo a series of checks before being published. Machine learning models analyze a multitude of unique data points, including behavior and purchasing patterns, the timing and frequency of reviews, relationships with reviewers, and any abuse reports submitted by customers. Large-scale language models (LLMs) help look for signs that reviews have been incentivized with gift cards, free products, or other forms of rebates.
Amazon executive Dharmesh Mehta, posting about the latest lawsuit, said fake product reviews artificially boost product ratings and search rankings, and that Amazon sellers and consultants are well aware of it. In the high-profile Amazon bribery criminal case, federal prosecutors alleged in 2020 that the defendants paid bribes to at least 10 Amazon employees and contractors to remove negative product reviews from product listings, in an attempt to trick Amazon's review ranking algorithm into believing the fake product reviews were posted by bona fide buyers.
In its current civil lawsuit, Amazon accuses the defendants of “using fake customer accounts to post false positive reviews and misleadingly inflate product and business ratings and rankings.”
Thursday's lawsuit was filed in King County Superior Court under case number 24-2-16106-6 SEA. Geekwire incorporated the lawsuit into its coverage of the story.
