The Better Business Bureau lets consumers leave reviews for and file complaints against businesses, but now the BBB has teamed up with one of those businesses to crack down on fake reviews. Amazon announced on Thursday it has filed a joint lawsuit with the BBB against ReviewServiceUSA.com.
Amazon alleged that “the owners and operators of the website attempted to sell fake positive reviews to bad actors for publication on Amazon product listing pages or BBB business profile pages,” stating the following in its announcement:
“However, an illicit “fake review broker” industry has emerged, where fraudulent businesses facilitate fake reviews in an attempt to mislead consumers. These fake reviews undermine trust in the reviews experience, which harms customers and sellers alike. Amazon invests significant resources to proactively stop fake reviews. This includes using machine-learning models and expert investigators to ensure that every review in its store is authentic, and taking legal action against fake review brokers worldwide to stop fake reviews at the source.”
In April, Amazon published the following video on YouTube that explained the technology behind its fake-review detection system:
The video explains that Amazon every review goes through a series of checks before it is published. Machine learning models analyze a multitude of proprietary data points, including behavioral and purchasing patterns; the timing and frequency of reviews; alongside relationships to reviewers, customers’ submitted reports of abuse, and more. Large language models, or LLMs, help it look for indications that a review was incentivized with a gift card, free product, or some other form of reimbursement.
In posting about the latest lawsuit, Amazon executive Dharmesh Mehta said fake product reviews artificially inflate product ratings and search rankings – something about which Amazon sellers and consultants are all too aware. In the famous Amazon bribery criminal case, federal prosecutors alleged in 2020 that defendants paid bribes to at least ten different Amazon employees and contractors to delete negative product reviews from product listings and attempted to trick Amazon’s review-ranking algorithm into believing fraudulent product reviews had been posted by bona fide purchasers.
In the current civil case, Amazon accuses the defendant of using “fake customer accounts to post inauthentic positive reviews to misleadingly inflate a product or business’s rating and ranking.”
Thursday’s lawsuit was filed in King County Superior Court under case number 24-2-16106-6 SEA. Geekwire embedded the lawsuit in its coverage of the story.
