Amazon, Better Business Bureau join forces to fight fake reviews

Amazon and the Better Business Bureau have partnered together. The two filed a lawsuit against an alleged fake review broker in hopes of stopping the practice and ensuring an experience shoppers can trust.

To illustrate the problem, the Troubleshooters once created our own online business to see if we could buy and post fake reviews and it was alarmingly easy to do.

The Troubleshooters warned you that bogus reviews were a big problem in 2018.

“I mean I just turned over a file two weeks ago of 26,000 fake reviews,” said Jason Brown of ReviewFraud.org.

Amazon said in 2023, it proactively blocked more than 250 million suspected fake reviews.

“Our machine learning is looking at thousands of data points, just continuously looking for risk signals that only we can see internally,” said Rebecca Mind of Amazon, Customer Trust and Abuse Prevention.

Amazon said thanks to its efforts, only one percent of its products list bogus reviews. But the company also admitted it can be hard for consumers to detect those fake reviews on their own.

“They might be looking at one too many exclamation points or bad grammar and these are just not great indications of whether the review is authentic or if it’s fake,” said Mind.

So now Amazon has teamed up with the Better Business Bureau to file a lawsuit against ReviewServiceUSA.com.

The lawsuit alleges the website tried to sell fake reviews to bad actors to post on Amazon product listing pages or BBB business profile pages. It claims ReviewServiceUSA used fake customer accounts to post inauthentic positive reviews to inflate ratings and rankings.

“By working together, we can really send that message to fake review brokers that we are going to shut down these fake reviews at the source,” said Mind.

It appears the action may have already been successful because ReviewServiceUSA.com is no longer active.

And Namecheap, Inc, the contact listed for its registered URL, told the Troubleshooters, “Please be informed that the abusive service has been suspended.”

In March, Amazon obtained a first-of-its-kind judgment against one fake review broker and a few other cases are currently pending.