Amazon has sued the administrators of more than 11,000 Facebook groups for allegedly facilitating the purchase and sale of fake reviews on the Amazon marketplace in seven countries.
The group administrators are accused of recruiting people to write fake or misleading reviews of products in exchange for money or free items.
Amazon has been troubled by fake reviews for years. Fake reviews can lead to consumers buying sub-par or questionable products. But the issue has become worse over recent years, growing worse, especially during the Covid pandemic.
During Covid, the demand for e-commerce exploded, with people taking to the internet to do all of their shopping, especially during lockdowns and fear of illness.
Unscrupulous merchants found many new opportunities during this time to use fake reviews to prop up their businesses.
It has become such a major issue that in the United Kingdom, regulators opened up an investigation into whether Amazon and Google have harmed consumers by failing to sufficiently protect them from fake reviews. The two companies agreed last year to comply with the inquiry.
Today, Amazon said its new fleet of lawsuits will allow it to “identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters” that the company’s systems, both automated and human, have not been able to catch on their own.
The lawsuit targets activity that has reportedly led to fake reviews across Amazon in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan.
The fake reviews extended across a wide range of products, from car stereos to camera tripods.
In the complaint, Amazon said that it would be taking legal action “in order to learn the identities of their administrators, shut down those Groups, and seek disgorgement of their ill-gotten gains from brokering fake reviews.”
The legal complaint asks for a court in the state of Washington to provide a cease-and-desist order against the alleged fake-review brokers and asks for damages and attorneys’ fees to be awarded to Amazon.
Amazon said that Facebook’s parent company Meta has removed more than 5,000 fake-review groups from its social media platform since 2020 as a result of Amazon’s reports to the social media giant.
One of the groups Meta removed from Facebook this year was called “Amazon Product Review,” with a whopping 43,000 plus members.
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