Amazon has sued group administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups. The company claims that these Facebook groups are creating fake reviews for the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan markets on Amazon.com.
The tech behemoth claims that these admins offer cash or free goods in exchange for Amazon reviews.
One of the groups, which Facebook’s parent company Meta erased earlier this year, had over 43,000 members. The group went by the name “Amazon Product Review.”
The admins would issue refunds once the group members had made the necessary purchases and submitted their reviews for the products. There were various products involved, such as camera tripods and automobile stereos.
Numerous reviews, especially good ones, increase a seller’s visibility on Amazon’s platform and elevates search engine results.
Amazon merchants have the option of paying lawfully for services that guarantee to raise their online ratings without necessarily being aware that this will be accomplished through the use of fake reviews.
According to Amazon, the group admins hide words and phrases that would have been detected as rule-breaking by Meta’s automatic systems.
A Facebook post promising “R*fnd Aftr R*vew” was one of the examples given (refund after review).
Once they were reported by Amazon, Meta removed around half of the groups. Amazon, however, claimed that all of its admins were being sought after.
Dharmesh Mehta, vice president of Amazon’s selling partner services, stated that taking proactive legal action against unethical players is one of many ways the e-commerce company protects customers by holding them accountable.
A court in Washington King County, close to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, is where the lawsuit was filed.