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

So Amazon is complicit in fraud.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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”.