Amazon Sues Facebook Group Administrators for Fake-Review Fraud

Amazon filed legal action in King County Superior Court in Seattle against the administrators of over 10,000 Facebook groups that it says attempt to orchestrate fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for money or free products, the company said Tuesday, citing car stereos and camera tripods as examples. One of the groups identified in the lawsuit is Amazon Product Review, which Amazon claimed had more than 43,000 members until Meta took down the group this year. The groups are allegedly set up to recruit individuals willing to post “incentivized and misleading reviews” on Amazon e-commerce sites in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan, the company said. Amazon will use information discovered in the legal action to identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by the fraudsters that haven’t been detected by its technology, investigators and monitoring, it said. “Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon vice president-selling partner services. Amazon’s investigations showed the group’s administrators attempted to hide their activity and evade Facebook’s detection, in part by “obfuscating letters from problematic phrases.” Amazon “strictly prohibits fake reviews and has more than 12,000 employees around the world dedicated to protecting its stores from fraud and abuse," the company said. A dedicated team investigates fake reviews on social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, and regularly reports abusive groups to those companies, it said. Of the more than 10,000 fake review groups Amazon has reported to Meta since 2020, Meta has taken down more than half of the groups for policy violations and continues to investigate others, Amazon said. It called fake reviews an “industry-wide problem,” saying civil litigation “is only one step.” Amazon advocated public-private collaboration among affected companies, social media sites and law enforcement focused on greater consumer protection.