The review system in electronic commerce is one of the ways that consumers have to launch into the purchase of an item that we may have never even seen in person. However, if this system is violated with false and/or erroneous reviews, the ratings lose their effectiveness and the online trust in these online stores.

Amazon’s problem with reviews

Anyone who buys regularly at Amazon knows that, as in any other store, both online and physical, they can reach give you a pig in a poke. We tend to trust more products whose reviews have thousands of opinions and the sum of these approaches the score to five stars. So many people can’t be wrong, right?

However, a few months ago a case exploded in which fake SSD drives with a similar appearance to the Samsung T5 or T7. Inside, instead of a solid-state drive and its advantages, there were hacked memory cards inside a casing to fool buyers.

Victims of this scam wasted their money thinking they were buying a high-capacity hard drive with an excellent rating of almost 5 stars and over 8,000 reviews, plus, compromised the integrity of your data when using these devices. The newspaper La Vanguarda, upon discovering the deception, alerted the company itself, as well as the Ministry of Consumption, which can investigate these frauds ex officio.

To the question about how this article was able to get so many positive reviews, because not everyone was able to sit idly by without discovering the hoax, the answer leads us to a certainty. There is companies that buy positive reviews of products. This market is carried through Telegram groups. Users get paid to flood product listings with positive comments that bait potential buyers.

How to end these inflated scores

Amazon has a new plan in place to combat fake reviews through public-private collaboration. Last year, 125 million customers contributed almost 1.5 billion reviewsTherefore, this system cannot be left uncontrolled and contaminated.

“Our goal is to ensure that every review posted on Amazon is authoritative and accurately reflects actual customer experiences. For this reason, at Amazon we encourage the publication of authentic reviews and categorically prohibit those that intentionally try to deceive customers, providing partial, inaccurate or unrelated information with the product or service reviewed.

To strengthen this area, a significant amount of resources is being invested in proactively stopping fake reviews on Amazon, including the use of machine learning models that analyze a multitude of data for potential indicators of risk such as related account usage, suspicious login activity and review history, and other unusual behavioral signals. “Likewise, our team of expert investigators uses sophisticated fraud detection tools to analyze and prevent false reviews from being published in our stores”.

The newspaper that denounced Amazon’s practices in the case of the hard drive welcomes the fact that the objective is being set on buying positive votes, but points out another credibility leak. “The system of manipulation of evaluations that we denounce is based on the fact that one product receives the scores of another. Case in point: the scores that led one of these fake hard drives to be one of Amazon’s best-selling electronics products came from a very different product, a box of crayons.”.