AMAZON has filed a lawsuit against more than 1,000 individuals who have allegedly posted bogus reviews of products online.
The online retail giant is targeting account holders on Fiverr.com, which offers false review services starting at $5, most of which are five-star reviews. It is demanding that the defendants cease selling Amazon reviews, reveal who is purchasing the service and identify which reviews were paid for, CBS News reported.
“While small in number, these reviews can significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon’s brand,” the online retailer stated in its complaint.
Reviews are both positive and negative, although most defendants offered five-star feedback, according to the complaint.
“Indeed, many encourage the Amazon seller to create the text for their own reviews,” the complaint states.
But people are also often paid to create and submit critical reviews to negatively impact competitors, NewYorker.com editor Nick Thompson told CBS.
Regardless of whether an individual is a customer or not, anyone is able to post reviews on merchandise sold on Amazon.com. However, the site’s rules state that paid or fictional reviews are prohibited. The company is suing for breach of contract and for violating Washington’s consumer protection laws, according to CNN.
The retailer said it conducted an investigation, including buying fake customer reviews on Fiverr from people who pledged five-star ratings, BBC reported. It also offered to allow purchasers to write reviews.
Some reviewers attempted to circumvent controls on Amazon.com by submitting content through different accounts and by using unique IP addresses, according to court documents.
Many of the paid reviews in this case were written abroad, which makes it more difficult to identify the writers.
Fiverr said it was working with Amazon to resolve the issue, BBC reported. However, it declined to state whether or not it will cooperate in the case, saying “we actively remove services that violate our terms of use.”
“The challenge of merchants soliciting illegitimate reviews is one that faces all marketplaces and online platforms,” Fiverr said in a statement. “In fact, in our own marketplace we restrict reviews to only those who we can verify have actually purchased a service.”
On Monday’s “CBS This Morning,” Thomspon offered advice on how to discern bogus reviews, such as by using websites that help authenticate how valid they are and for searching for specific descriptions.
“Hotel reviews that tend to have specific details like ‘the bathroom is large’ tend to be real because if they’ve got that sort of spacial information, it means that someone was actually there,” Thompson said, according to CBS.
He also said that companies need to work on training algorithms to discern fake reviews from real ones.
The lawsuit follows a similar case in April when Amazon sued a number of websites for selling fake reviews. Most of the sites in the earlier incident have been shut down, CNN reported.
For this lawsuit, Amazon has referred to the 1,114 defendants as “John Does,” as it does not know their real names.
“Amazon is bringing this action to protect its customers from this misconduct, by stopping defendants and uprooting the ecosystem in which they participate,” the lawsuit states.
