Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

Some company paid be 100 bucks to change my review to be positive so they sent the money via PayPal no problem then I changed the review to say they paid me to write a glowing review and of course Amazon ended up removing the review for being harmful to their customers

So they _can_ do something about fake reviews.

Thank you for sharing that anecdote… just terrible behavior on Amazons part.

Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews.

Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.

Nope, only real reviews.

Amazon is not the place I'd go to for electronics parts. Mouser and Digikey are my go-tos.

They can but they won’t. My original review was still there (as in was included in my updated review) saying how it was fundamentally flawed and will break. Was some video tripod with this dumb mechanism that would work itself loose by just panning. Never seen anything like it.

Plus side looks like the product doesn’t exist on Amazon so guess there’s a victory there somewhere.

Amazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good quality and what's not.

wow, full circle.. and just.. what to even do with that

I prefer eBay at least it’s cheaper and the sellers care about reputation

Yeah, I'm generally aware of that - but I needed them fast, and decided it was worth taking a gamble. (I did at least get a return/refund, so there's that.)

At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.

Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.

(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)

you're supposed to report this to amazon customer service not via a review. just send em a photo of the bribe and they'll verify it. yes it's not as satisfying but they can't validate your review unless you also posted a photo.

Much more, Amazon also loves to remove all reviews that mention that the product is counterfeit. Several times I did receive clear counterfeit goods via Amazon, but there is no way to warn others as these reviews are blocked.

Amazing BS policy, even people on Hacker Hews don’t know this approach.

I do Amazon Vine reviews and we learn quickly all the things we can't say. For health products you can hardly say anything due to the legalities of appearing to make health claims. People also get their reviews removed regularly for claiming something is inauthentic. I kind of get why, because a person probably doesn't have the equipment to really determine that, and Amazon has separate channels for reporting such things. Basically reviews are just for relating your experience of a product. There are ways of communicating lack of authenticity by being more humble, as in noting that it doesn't seem like leather, or when burned it melts like plastic. I've reviewed many e.g. fake memory cards, and had no problem noting that it has less capacity than claimed, and showing some test programs' results that confirm.

Part of the issue is that they commingle inventory their warehouses receive from third-party sellers based on ISBN. So if you receive a counterfeit, it might be the fault of the seller you bought it from, or it might be Amazon's fault for mixing in counterfeit goods from some other third-party seller without doing proper quality control. Unsurprisingly they don't want reviews that draw attention to this longstanding problem.

The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical.

One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.

The obvious implication being who Amazon considers to be their "customer". Hint, it's not you.

I kinda dropped using Amazon, both on principle, but also because they can't compete anymore.

Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.

That must explain why I’ve seen bad reviews that have 5 stars. I guess the review itself really does not matter as much as long as the stupid starts are there.

It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex management companies, Graystar using a similar method by bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5 star review on Google maps.

An "Every Wrong Door" Policy

This is the real issue.

With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.

>typically a week or more

I don't think there's a typical delivery speed at all as it depends massively on how close you live to one of their distribution centres. I can get most shit from Amazon next day where I live, some times same day if I pay extra (I don't) as I live only a few miles from one.

Well, last week Amazon customer support flow routed me to an LLM chat bot which hallucinated a 1-800 number to call which was most definitely not Amazon on the other end. That's the real usefulness of LLMs: blackhole any dissent now that your monopoly is fully operational.

Some company said they know where I live and they will pay me a visit if I don't remove the bad review (product was dangerous). That was on Amazon.

> At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.

Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.

Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."

Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."

In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.

Lcsc is cheap and ok.

If something is not remotely up to standard, do a return. I know it's bad for the planet, but it is rather painful for them and probably only stick there is.

It is even worse for the planet when scammers keep flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority of people become accustomed to low quality and short replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about quality and product safety has to go through the returns process today but has no high quality options left anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.

Amusingly: when it comes to clones of very fancy western knives, all these problems go away because those duplicates are largely all from the same factory, and there’s even premium cloning brands which have duplicate store fronts

Ebay is not the best for dropshipped Chinese crap. It's markedly better for about anything else.

So Amazon is complicit in fraud.

I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?

"It's great! Haven't tried it yet, but it looks nice"

(average aliexpress review on many tech items)

Amazon is great for returns.

Buy $50 something from aliexpress, doesn't work, you can't do anything. Seller wont refund directly, you need to send the item back... to china... and fill out export forms and pay more than $50 for registered mail.

Amazon? Doesn't work? Doesn't matter why, here's the return label, we'll refund you the moment we get the return.

Do they know where we live? Aren't orders fulfilled by Amazon?

Did you report this to the police?

Amazon also has sellers that do their own fulfillment.

I just returned something on AliExpress last week.(Wrong items sent.) Sagawa showed up at my door to collect the package, I paid nothing, and AliExpress refunded me before it even left the country once Sagawa notified them that the package was collected.

So it really depends where you live.

What I don't understand is why some law firm, heavy with Ivy league predators, does not eye Amazon's fraud engine as a pot of generational gold to be taken? Sure, it will take some effort, but that's a huge pot of gold just sitting in the open with this blatant fraud in broad daylight.

It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate. They also have a massive problem with fake bad reviews where a competitor spams competing products to try to increase sales of their own.

They have so many flavors of fraud that it’s very hard to get it right consistently at scale.

Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.

There’s an old law school adage that A students become professors, B students go to work for C students.

It's similar for "shark attorneys," who will typically hail from tier 2 and 3 schools. They're the aggressive hustlers.

Sure, just like the highway patrol can do something about speeding. Note that “do something” does not convey “completely eliminate with perfect fairness and accuracy”.

Internally we brag about how our LLM black hole "delights our customers"

> Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.

That's a general social media thing and it's annoying as hell. Means every statement that corrects falsehoods and misconceptions against something that you yourself don't like needs to come with a disclaimer that you don't actually like it.

Just buy from anywhere else? It's not like there aren't plenty of other stores on the internet selling whatever garbage you need.

You make good points, but I'm not convinced this isn't deliberate on the part of Amazon. First, Amazon deliberately keeps buyers in the dark - e.g. sellers can pay extra to avoid comingling, but Amazon gives buyers no way to find this out. Second, this kind of reckless approach to fakes is what enabled Amazon's rapid growth over traditional retailers with hand-picked, verified goods. It's not surprising they try to sweep problems with their approach under the rug.

Perhaps not 'complicit', but with a reckless disregard towards fraud.

It was always free to ignore customers. A thin layer of AI slop doesn't change the behavior. Competition should close the loop here, but free markets don't exist and power has marketshare has been consolidated.

> There’s an old law school adage that A students become professors

If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.

> I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?

I'd sure like to know if I'm buying counterfeits, and, unless the product is identified as "Counterfeit Such-and-such" or the platform can otherwise identify them, it doesn't help me for reviews of the counterfeit product to be lumped in with reviews of legitimate ones. (And, if the platform can identify the counterfeits, then it should be taking them down, not showing me cleverly mingled reviews.)

The problem is that they have an obvious incentive to err on the side of positive reviews. Because if every product on the site has a 1 star review few people will buy anything. But if most of them have 5 stars people will be much more eager to purchase.

You can't use the word "counterfeit" or suggest that. But you can absolutely give 1 star and explain you only got milliamps. I have a bunch of 1 star reviews. I've never had anything taken down except when I used the word "counterfeit". Also, I get it -- how do you know if it's actually counterfeit, or genuine but low-quality? There are a bunch of things I've bought that I suspected were counterfeit, then went to my local store and discovered no, the authentic item is just crap.

If you buy from china, it’s going to take weeks. If you buy from US and live in Canada, you’re going to pay a lot of customs.

In 2007, I bought a used MacBook on Ebay for $870, with shipping it was about $900. That was back when the currency was on parity.

It arrived with $300 custom fees. I could have bought a new one at that price.

I bought a light fixture that had a design flaw that turned it into a fire hazard. I contacted Amazon and provided proof, hoping they’d take the product down and prevent harm to others. They did initially but within a few days the same exact item with matching SKU and photos was listed.

I have an entire category of items I will never buy from Amazon. They don’t look out for customers ahead of time, only on the backend when you complain.

Silk is particularly bad. Order anything "silk" from amazon and you are almost certainly getting satin. Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.

Amazon should be busted for false advertising. Millions of products filled with lies and amazon does absolutely nothing to curate (other than removing comments warning others that a product is fake).

My wife has bought a handful of flat-pack cabinets and shelves over the last year, and it has been an experience in frustration, and furniture half assembled for weeks while we wait on a weirdly sized bolt to arrive from china because it was missing, or in one case, an entire door, or in another case a handle had been tapped to the wrong size (too big) for the bolts.

The crazy thing is these $100-250 products ship with instructions on getting 100% of your purchase back if you leave a 5-star review and email them proof you did.

I've never had to return to AliExpress - if I've had an issue they (AliExpress) have just instantly refunded me without having to go through the seller(admittedly this is maybe 2 items in nearly 10 years).

Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.

I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.

Yeah my partner and I quit using them because we’d buy like 5-10 things and return them all because of issues like not matching the product listing or being garbage quality. The last straw was when they clawed back a return refund 4 times on the same return. Each time she would have to call them to get it reinstated.

> Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.

Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it wants.

Amazon does have the Vine program so if companies want to have a legitimate free product review program they can opt in. I’m in Vine and we’re supposed to leave a review based on using the product, take photos, etc. If anything goes wrong we are not supposed to send the product back, return it, etc. The sellers can’t contact us and if we do we’re supposed to report it. The automated “did you get the product” are fine but it’s not ok for them to bribe us.

Most of the Chinese crap sold on Amazon is identical to what you find on AliExpress and Temu marked up 50-200%.

> If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.

Or more likely a jaded B-student who has been around the block a few times.

The reason this works is that the C-students include students who have always known that their social network would facilitate them being rainmakers, while B-students are often middle-class try-hards who don’t have the right social network and don’t have the social skills to develop the right one.

The thing is, you paid for that in the price which is often 3x more for the same thing you could get on Aliexpress. I bought plenty of stuff on Aliexpress and I had issue only once when I got something different than I ordered. Overall even if I lost on that one purchase a bit, I saved plenty of money on other purchases. And they have a lot of stuff that's simply unavailable elsewhere. Even if they sold me some counterfeit transistors, those must be really good counterfeits, because they measure fine.

The stuff on aliexpress is not low quality. I mean, some for sure is if you look for the cheapest items, but there is plenty of solid quality stuff there as well.

Yeah but honestly unless it's a repeat purchase, I'll pay it for the customer service (and ordering experience frankly) being similarly up 5,000-20,000%.

At least IKEA has a specific way to handle that, including IIRC a dedicated area at their stores.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/spare-parts/

It's happened to my reviews. The seller contested it and got Amazon to remove my review.

I have no way to get the review back up or to contest the action.

Do you believe this?

If Amazon put out the effort to actually combat all the shady things their marketplace helps facilitate, they wouldn't make nearly as much money.

Much cheaper to just buy out the governments (https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/summary?id=D0000...) that could make legal trouble for you.

If you pay about 5-10% more you can get it from a us based drop shipper. Obviously if you buy it from china you might as well get it from aliexpress

> Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate

They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo, information from caching servers at ISPs, device fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences, mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer reviews, description text and image analysis, product change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking details, registration and tax documents, all of it and more. They are one of the biggest data processing technology companies in the world (various flavours of "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs for using PII for fraud prevention.

I am completely sure you could shine a great big data science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the data for that is carefully monitored) or attract regulatory attention they can't lobby away.

Then again, who would win, one of the world's biggest AI company or the word "without": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirt+without+stripes

I had one do something that presented a different angle for a complaint...

Some Amazon seller included some US postage stamps as a gift, along with a glossy full-color printed offer to pay me cash or more stamps for a positive review.

So I took the stamps to a post office, some kind of manager looked at them, said they'd almost guarantee that the stamps were counterfeit. So I left the stamps and the glossy offer (with the sellers's contact info) with them, to refer higher up to some kind of investigation.

I'd guess probably it will only lead back to some overseas seller who is untraceable, and who just pops back up under 10 new different names. But maybe someday Amazon will be under some kind of KYC-like obligation, to only permit sellers and other supply chain that can be held accountable for illegal/counterfeit/dangerous/stolen/etc. products.

Not only that, but if you get people buying lemons from scammers, some percentage will forgo the refund process and re-engage with Amazon to buy something else: Amazon gets a cut of that too, plus more eyes on other products during that process. And even if there is refund, the platform will get that money back from the seller anyway.

This is true of a lot of product types, but there is often a QC process that happens for the "premier" name brand that they were manufactured for. And these "duplicates" are frequently the irregulars that didn't make the cut.

In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter unexpectedly.

This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from AliExpress et al., and not others.

No, because we have mickey mouse police here in the UK. I deleted the review.

What kind of knives are we talking about?

I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and both are such high quality for what feels like a reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can have serious consequences.

Facilitating fraud.

Didn't Napster get buttfucked for "facilitating" piracy?

Should have been owned by Bezos so they'd be immune from laws that affect only mere mortals.

> It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate.

Well that's on Amazon then. They could go the Walmart route and enforce in-house random testing on the stuff they sell. Walmart, for all the rightful hate they get, Aldi, Lidl, Costco, Coop, they all have very strict and extensive negotiations for purchase, and they can, do and will refuse shipments from vendors that fail to meet QA.

But they don't, that's how Bezos got one of the richest men in the world. And Amazon got entrenched way too fast for regulators to ever meaningfully catch up.

“Item received, will update later when I try it” = it killed them

I’ve been playing with cssbuy (there is pandabuy too) lately. Aliexpress range at temu prices basically.

But sometimes you know it's counterfeit.

I've had one taken down. I pointed out the deception in the naming and that the product looked nothing like the real thing, nor did it fit. Only later did I realize they were selling it as "Genuine Beam", not that it was genuine "Beam"--I thought they were just making clear that it wasn't a knockoff. (Beam is the actual company name.)

Yeah, they can't always get it right but something that would go a long way towards combatting it: Reputation scores on reporting. Accounts that have spent a fair amount of money over a fair amount of time and which do not have a track record of making false reports should be allowed to flag things. And if a product gets enough flags a human looks into it. The more times you flag something that is deemed wrong the more your vote counts in the future. The more times they decide it's clearly legit the less your vote counts. (And there would be a not sure range in the middle that produces no change.)

And let me flag this is a that. Many years ago I reported a search that returned three pages of results for one product that only comes by the box and by the case. Last I looked it was still three pages.

This doesn't work unless you have someone verifying that products from both sellers are identical. Seller A could be selling real logitech gear and seller B could be selling clones, as is common on poorly policed markets like Amazon and Aliexpress.

And most of the products I've seen "grouped" in this way haven't had identifiable branding, they were just generic functional products like "heat shrink", or "M4x20 screws".

For a one-shot game, sure.

But when people buy a 5-star product that sucks and return it, Amazon loses money.

Amazon is better off having low ratings for products that are returned more.

I thought I was pretty clear that I wasn’t excusing them, just correcting a naive misconception around “why don’t they just allow all negative reviews”.