Amazon Reviews - When is Manipulation Fraud?

[Babbylonian]

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?

Amazon could fix most of the problem overnight: Require each review to be joined with a unique purchase (different customer name, different CC#, etc.) from their site. As has been pointed out though, they don't have any particular interest in doing so unless sales go down and the decrease can be demonstrated to be because people find the reviews to be unreliable.

 

[Robrob]

No incentive for Amazon to give more than lip service to policing its review policy. Positive reviews sell books, negative reviews don't.

Absolutely not illegal in the least. Unethical yes but not illegal.

 

[Cain]

Thank goodness our respected institutions of higher learning do not juice the college rankings.

As someone above says, you can give priority to a "verified purchase." Still, obviously it's possible someone could have bought the product elsewhere and then posted a legitimate review. In the case of a newly released ebook, I imagine there would be a high number of verified purchases.

 

[angrysoba]

Oh, I am sure the practice is rife!

And lest we think only self-published Kindle novelists write up positive reviews of themselves and rubbish their competitors have a read of this story about the behaviour of "award-winning historian" and self-proclaimed victim of Stalin, Orlando Figes:

Award-winning historian Orlando Figes: I posted anonymous reviews on Amazon
Orlando Figes, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, initially hid behind his wife and allowed her to take responsibility for the anonymous comments which were published on a web site.

He even threatened to sue a fellow historian for libel when his name was linked to the online reviews.
In a humiliating turnaround, however, Prof Figes has acknowledged that it was he who described the works of rivals as "pretentious" and "curiously dull".

He now faces legal action from at least two of the authors he wrote about.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...ges-I-posted-anonymous-reviews-on-Amazon.html

The anonymous reviewer - using the nom-de-plume "Historian" and the secondary identity "orlando-birkbeck" had described Dr Polonsky's book Molotov's Magic Lantern, as "dense", "pretentious" and "the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published".

The reviewer meanwhile described The Whisperers, Prof Figes's latest book, in more positive terms.

"Beautifully written ... leaves the reader awed, humbled yet uplifted ... a gift to us all," he said.

 

[Rasmus]

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).

Even then they might just be following the one actual good review that is out there.

Not only do good reviews boost sales, but any kind of censorship might get the site in a lot more trouble than simply allowing users to voice their opinions either way.

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?)

That would be possible - but it would restrict the number of legitimate reviews that you could have on any given site *and* someone with enough money at hand might still find it profitable to pay for reviews in their favor.

I'm interested in your former career - who used to commission you? What types of reviews did you write? How much did you get?

As you can imagine my contract from back then makes it impossible to disclose those points. Just this much: I worked for a company that specialized in, let's say, fake user activity. Reviews, web-boards, you name it.

If I was feeling nasty I'd say the companies that placed orders were in dire need of some positive feedback and had little chance of ever generating genuinely positive reviews. (Ops, I guess I just did say it. Maybe I am not coping with not having had adequate amounts of food today... oh, well....)

In all seriousness, I felt dirty doing what i did, with few exceptions. (And ridiculous. There's some thing that you cannot possibly put in a good light without it all screaming "look at me, I am soooooooo fake!".) Not all of the customers, imho, would have had need for our services - but what do i know about these things?

I'd have to go look at what I made - it beat working in a call center; both financially and from a "killing my soul one bit at a time" perspective, too. Also, I seem to recall it depended on the kind of work I did - writing actual content, creating on-line identities, etc. I think it was a mix between an hourly rate for some stuff and a lump sum for specific other tasks.

 

[Beerina]

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

You silly data miner, you!



This reminds me of a few years back when Zima or someone hired mactors (waiter/waitress model/actress wannabees) to stand around in bars and drink their stuff.

I used to have problems finding a good anti-spyware thing on download.com. You go start reading the reviews and they say, "DO NOT INSTALL! Installs spyware!", which, of course, they didn't.

I thought it odd at the time that several different spyware products all had almost identical warning "reviews".

 

[Beerina]

what about writing lots of positive reviews under different names though? Would that be fraud? Or just gaming the system?

Logically speaking, it's fraud. In the US, I see commercials on TV, and if you see someone touting how the product helped them, it usually says "paid endorser" or "paid actor" or somesuch in barely readable fine print at the bottom.

Don't know if it's a law, but I'm fine with it.

 

[Gods Big Toe]

At Newegg they have reviews by \"verified owners\" in addition to unverified owners. I find it helpful when parsing the reviews.

Fraud typically requires the following four elements.

* an individual or an organization intentionally makes an untrue representation about an important fact or event:

* the untrue representation is believed by the victim (the person or organization to whom the representation has been made);

* the victim relies upon and acts upon the untrue representation;

* the victim suffers loss of money and/or property as a result of relying upon and acting upon the untrue representation.

I fail to see how pretending to be somebody else would absolve anyone on liability. If instead of on-line reviews a salesman suggested a person call some phony customers or presented phony testimonials, we would have no issues calling it fraud. So why would it not be fraud to write fake testimonials where something is going to be sold?

While these reviews are opinions, the untrue element is that the reader will believe these multiple reviews are coming from independent sources who are most likely owners of the product or who have at least seen it. While that may not be explicit, it is certainly implicit. Is that an important fact? That is debatable. I know that on Newegg that I am far more likely to purchase something that has lots of reviews if those reviews tend to be positive and do not indicate any major compatibility issues (Newegg sells a lot of computer components). I do not like being the first to buy something.

My guess is that it is simply not worth the effort to prosecute cases of bogus reviews, especially if the sales cross state lines. It would take a lot of effort to prove who actually posted the reviews, and that involves obtaining IP addresses and subsequently identities tied to IP addresses. It would be trivial to use proxies to make these reviews, and my guess is that one of the easiest safeguards Amazon (or anyone else could take) would be to flag multiple accounts from the same IP address in a relatively short period of time, which would mean proxies were likely used.

Fraud laws tend to be vague enough to cover new techniques for fraud while being specific enough that one should know if it is illegal or not. I think this technique qualifies, but I am not a lawyer - I just throw rotting vegetables at them.

 

[andyandy]

As you can imagine my contract from back then makes it impossible to disclose those points. Just this much: I worked for a company that specialized in, let's say, fake user activity. Reviews, web-boards, you name it.

If I was feeling nasty I'd say the companies that placed orders were in dire need of some positive feedback and had little chance of ever generating genuinely positive reviews. (Ops, I guess I just did say it. Maybe I am not coping with not having had adequate amounts of food today... oh, well....)

In all seriousness, I felt dirty doing what i did, with few exceptions. (And ridiculous. There's some thing that you cannot possibly put in a good light without it all screaming "look at me, I am soooooooo fake!".) Not all of the customers, imho, would have had need for our services - but what do i know about these things?

I'd have to go look at what I made - it beat working in a call center; both financially and from a "killing my soul one bit at a time" perspective, too. Also, I seem to recall it depended on the kind of work I did - writing actual content, creating on-line identities, etc. I think it was a mix between an hourly rate for some stuff and a lump sum for specific other tasks.

intriguing

I wonder if political parties engage in this kind of message board activity? The Chinese government certainly do....would the benefits outweigh the ensuing scandal for being found out...?

 

[andyandy]

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!!!

wow.....worst blurb ever?

They say twins know each other's thoughts. While on vacation, Cathy and Pat who are twins just might be in denial of this factor. When it comes to much needed love and Owen the next door neighbor is the only man in their lives, in reality, only one can have him, but it may appear everyone's in denial as each live out a fantasy with deep and somewhat strange psychological consequences in this gripping short story as they deal in their own way to let go of the guilt of a tragic family accident.

 

[icerat]

In the US it is actually illegal for people to post reviews of products without disclosing any relationship they may have with the seller, particularly if it's financial.

An author posting fake reviews is clearly breaking the law.

 

[paiute]

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

I read a couple pages of the free preview. It reads like it was written by a sixth-grader. And not a bright one, either.

 

[Brattus]

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

Well I clearly give this OP 5 stars! I wish I could give it 10! This post changed my life for the positive forever!
I happily suggest this thread to all my family members, friends and coworkers!
andyandy is better than the best and better than the rest!
Read it! Love it! Live it!

 

[andyandy]

Well I clearly give this OP 5 stars! I wish I could give it 10! This post changed my life for the positive forever!
I happily suggest this thread to all my family members, friends and coworkers!
andyandy is better than the best and better than the rest!
Read it! Love it! Live it!

I'm tempted to have that as my new sig

 

[stokes234]

They should only allow amazon reviews to be written by people who have actually bought the product at least a few days ago with that amazon account.

 

[ZirconBlue]

Amazon does have the "Amazon Verified Purchase" listed on reviews, but I don't think you can filter by that.

 

[Psi Baba]

wow.....worst blurb ever?

They say twins know each other's thoughts. While on vacation, Cathy and Pat who are twins just might be in denial of this factor. When it comes to much needed love and Owen the next door neighbor is the only man in their lives, in reality, only one can have him, but it may appear everyone's in denial as each live out a fantasy with deep and somewhat strange psychological consequences in this gripping short story as they deal in their own way to let go of the guilt of a tragic family accident.

What, you don't enjoy a good story about much needed love and Owen?

So wait, Cathy and Pat (who are twins, of course) are in denial of knowing each others thoughts only while on vacation? What?

 

[RemieV]

?

You realize that the New York Times Bestseller List only cares about how many copies of a book was sold, not how good they were.

Therefore, if an author thinks that being on the list will improve their sales in the long run, they can send out a marketing team to purchase thousands of copies of a book, thus driving it onto the list.

Not considered fraud.

Reviews and such, or arbitrary compilations of lists written by several parties regarding books and music and whatnot can't be fraud because the claims can't be objectively proven false.

The reviewers you're uncovering are just employees of a marketing firm.

 

[fuelair]

wow.....worst blurb ever?

No, I promise everything attached to her The Greek Seaman was worse.

 

[mgidm86]

The same thing happens on the iTunes App Store. I am a game developer and I know that some big companies pump out fake reviews for themselves.

These are often very obvious. They often sound as if they were written by the same person with the same broken English (thinking of a particular big Korean developer). Most of these reviewers will have only reviewed games by the same company.

Another trick is that the reviewers will have several reviews for other companies apps, but they will be for products that are free...meaning the reviewer downloads a bunch of free games, and gives a fast one sentence review to make them look legit to people like me who can spot the phonies.

But the worst: it is widely known that there are companies you can pay to post positive reviews for you on the App Store. I'm trying to find a link as proof, but my back really hurts right now and I need to get away from the computer.

Yelp has been accused of deleting negative reviews for people who pay to advertise with them. My brother got such an offer from them, which is how I learned of it. They said they could make the positive reviews more prominent - I don't believe they stated that they would delete them. Many articles and discussions are out there in Google-Land.

EDIT:
Here is an article discussing the App Store "Pay For Good Reviews" deal I mentioned earlier, with links to a few companies. It's all I can muster for now.

"Hear me now, believe me later!"
-Hans n Franz