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Amazon Reviews - When is Manipulation Fraud?

andyandy

anthropomorphic ape
andyandy
Joined
Apr 30, 2006
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Ok, so I thought I'd search Amazon for the most popular books - and one of the first up is Hacker Hunter - a spy thriller ebook. Well it was released just over a month ago and it has a staggering 350 reviews already - 332 with 5 stars and 11 with 4 stars. Seems a bit curious, so I click on some of the reviews to see what else they've written. And guess what, they all follow exactly the same pattern - only 2-3 previous reviews, on random books/products always written on the same day/couple of days as the review for this book....

It's pretty clear that this is pretty dodgy - but would a concerted effort to rig reviews actually count as fraud? What about leaving positive reviews of your own business on Tripadvisor (or negative reviews about someone else's?) Whoever is behind this particular case, well it's a pretty impressive feat - all the reviews are distinct, and not only would you need separate accounts for each of them, they've obviously gone to the trouble of making sure that each "person" leaves a couple of extra reviews to presumably get round Amazon's checks on fake reviews.....

So a few questions,

1) what is the legal position on fake reviews online? (UK or elsewhere)
2) has anyone ever been convicted of conducting fraud doing this?
3) are there companies who will actually do this for you - or do you just need to do it yourself with multiple logins?
4) shouldn't Amazon have a better monitoring system to weed out concerted fakery?

discuss :)
 
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For starters:

In tens of millions of reviews on Web sites like Amazon.com, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and Yelp, new books are better than Tolstoy, restaurants are undiscovered gems and hotels surpass the Ritz.

Or so the reviewers say. As online retailers increasingly depend on reviews as a sales tool, an industry of fibbers and promoters has sprung up to buy and sell raves for a pittance.

“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.”

The boundless demand for positive reviews has made the review system an arms race of sorts. As more five-star reviews are handed out, even more five-star reviews are needed. Few want to risk being left behind.

Sandra Parker, a freelance writer who was hired by a review factory this spring to pump out Amazon reviews for $10 each, said her instructions were simple. “We were not asked to provide a five-star review, but would be asked to turn down an assignment if we could not give one,” said Ms. Parker, whose brief notices for a dozen memoirs are stuffed with superlatives like “a must-read” and “a lifetime’s worth of wisdom.”

Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who recently published a paper about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon, Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/technology/finding-fake-reviews-online.html
 
Writing positive reviews of your own product cannot be any more illegal than positively advertising your own product. What could be fraudulent is if Amazon.com omits negative reviews and publishes only the more positive reviews.

If you want a fair review, visit some consumer organization website which is reviewing things but not selling any of it. Of course the comments can include advertorials also there. Books are a difficult subject because they are very much a matter of taste. What you want is a random poll take, which cannot be manipulated by an interested party. Difficult in cases where only a handful of people are interested to write a review, and quite naturally many or most of them can be employees of a company marketing or reselling the product.
 
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The onus is on Amazon (or other websites) to establish tighter controls and safeguards.
 
JJM 777 said:
Writing positive reviews of your own product cannot be any more illegal than positively advertising your own product. What could be fraudulent is if Amazon.com omits negative reviews and publishes only the more positive reviews.
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what about writing lots of positive reviews under different names though? Would that be fraud? Or just gaming the system?

I've always thought Amazon reviews were largely trust-worthy - sure I know there are going to be fake reviews, ones written by the author etc, but i kinda thought that if a book had hundreds of reviews, most of these would be genuine. What appears to be the case with the Hacker Hunter is that every single one of the 350 reviews is bogus (I don't claim to have checked the user profiles of all 350 reviewers, but the large cross-section i did click on all fit exactly the same MO - writing their first ever review within a couple of days of reviewing that book, having a maximum of 3 reviews all written at the same time, and then having never written anything else.)

Churning out 350 reviews in 5 weeks - basically 10 a day is impressive, and more so as each would require a new username, and another 2-3 reviews to flesh out their profile. So you're looking at 1000+ reviews, all handwritten and not computer generated in just over a month. That's a big job - makes me wonder if it's the work of a company rather than an individual.....
 
It's pretty obvious when a lot of fake reviews are up. You'd think they'd make a reporting feature to penalize the obvious frauds. It's pretty common even for well-known books like "The Four Hour Body" to submit tons of fake reviews and for dozens of commenters to notice it. So it's less a problem of Amazon needing an algorithm from Cornell researchers and more of an issue of them actually doing something about it.
 
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Tripadvisor was exposed some time ago, and I never take notice of Amazon reviews. This is where reviews in the mainstream press become more important, although obviously not infallible.
 
I know at least one sci-fi author who urges his fanboys to submit multiple positive reviews and criticise negative reviews, even before they've seen the book.
He's even known to follow the more articulate negative reviewers to other reviews just to criticise them. Pathetic really.
 
I used to make a living for a short while writing fake reviews; 350 on one site in one month would take a bit of effort and organization, but it can be done - by just one person, too, if they can churn out so many words in such a short time, too.

I am not sure what amazon et al could do here - even if it is obvious that not all 350 reviews are genuine, how do you tell which are legit? How do you ensure that you don't introduce unfairness yourself by deleting proper positive ratings?
 
Actually, Amazon is quite notorious for removing negative reviews. Fake positive ones help sell junk, so they have no incentive to stop them.
 
Joey McGee said:
You'd think they'd make a reporting feature to penalize the obvious frauds.
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You think that - it doesn't require much - just a "report fake" option....obviously they're not too bothered by it.

Rasmus said:
I used to make a living for a short while writing fake reviews; 350 on one site in one month would take a bit of effort and organization, but it can be done - by just one person, too, if they can churn out so many words in such a short time, too.

I am not sure what amazon et al could do here - even if it is obvious that not all 350 reviews are genuine, how do you tell which are legit? How do you ensure that you don't introduce unfairness yourself by deleting proper positive ratings?
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From the pattern it looks like all 350 are fake - but i take the wider point, if they are all written by hand, then it is going to be difficult to weed out false reviews (unless people are stupid and swamp a book with hundreds of positive reviews using the same MO). Maybe having a filter function to only reviews linked to accounts with unique credit cards would be a start. (I presume you can create an Amazon account without giving your credit card? Or by using the same card more than once?)

I'm interested in your former career - who used to commission you? What types of reviews did you write? How much did you get? :)
 
Clicking on the only genuinely negative review:

This book is almost impossible to read! The use of language and grammar are so amateurish that I assume it has been 'self-published'. A potentially intriguing story-line is lost in clunky, inept phraseology, stereotypical characterisations and very odd changes of tense within paragraphs! I gave up after 15 pages.
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this apparently sparks a Amazon comment exchange where the author magically pops up with a lengthy justification for his bad grammar and punctuation. Interesting ;)
 
As always, there's an xkcd for that.

Astroturfing has been around as long as grassroots movements, like so many other things, online anonymity makes it easier to get away with.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
Actually, Amazon is quite notorious for removing negative reviews. Fake positive ones help sell junk, so they have no incentive to stop them.
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This sounds expectable, if one assumes that positive reviews lead to more sales, and negative reviews lead to fewer sales.

Then one could assume that manipulating the reviews has no effect on total sales, because fair reviews would only mean that the truly good products sell more and the bad ones less, the total sales remaining same. But this is probably not true, because:
- sales of products where the customer is eventually not happy with the product probably increases the total sales a bit, because the customer might soon be back to buy something else, as the first bought product was not satisfactory
- if amazon.com fails to manipulate its reviews, sales would be lost to other websites than amazon.com which do manipulate their reviews

Business is business, unregulated market is unregulated market, a company cannot save the market by acting nicely, it only means that more predatory companies conquer a larger share of the market.
 
andyandy said:
Clicking on the only genuinely negative review:



this apparently sparks a Amazon comment exchange where the author magically pops up with a lengthy justification for his bad grammar and punctuation. Interesting ;)
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This is a negative review:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15575171

More sinister if you ask me (even taking the extreme nature of this example out of the equation). I would expect a business to get supporters to write overly positive reviews, but a negative review seems more likely to be true to my subconscious at least.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
Actually, Amazon is quite notorious for removing negative reviews. Fake positive ones help sell junk, so they have no incentive to stop them.
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I give Amazon dot com five stars out of four, for managing to brilliantly merge competitive cutting-edge technology with the warm homeyness of a mom-and-pop bookstore. With an incredible selection, great deals, and superb customer service, Amazon dot com is my one-stop holiday shop for gifts for people of all ages. Truly Amazon is the shining pinnacle of excellence to which all businesses should aspire.

Amazon is also very prompt with rewarding those who do it service, wink wink, nudge nudge, where's my giftcard.
 
On the other hand, The Greek Seaman is no longer with us at Amazon. I miss those reviews!!!
 
That was fun

fuelair said:
For an example of Amazon review fudging: http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Passio...GAA4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322416673&sr=8-1

Particularly read the reviews by Sid, Geoff and lotus and the responses to lotus.

It is a fun activity!!!
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I particularly liked these comments:

1) Oh for the love of Pete... I was going to suggest that Ms. Howett (author of book being reviewed) wrote this review herself, but I think it's clear she can't write this well.

2) Speaking as a lover of short stories, the shorter Ms. Howett's stories are, the better.

3) This reviewer is probably one of Howett's family members/friends that are posting 5 star reviews for her horrible works.
 
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