Amazon is continuing their ongoing effort to ensure all the reviews written on their site are authentic. While it is impossible to eliminate all fake product reviews, it seems that they are now attempting to scare those who actually write the reviews out of offering this type of service. Amazon recently filed a lawsuit against 1114 users of the micro jobs site, Fiverr. The users offered to write and/or post fake reviews for products found on Amazon.com.
Many of the users on Fiverr who offer this type of service say specifically in their ads that they post from multiple different accounts and multiple different IP addresses to help ensure their reviews don’t get flagged as fake.
At this point Amazon is only targeting those who are actually offering the service and not those who have purchased the service or Fiverr at all.
Earlier this year Amazon also filed a lawsuit against several websites that offered to write Amazon reviews for people. Most of these sites in the lawsuit from back in April have closed down now, which shows that Amazon’s strategy is clearly successful.
Amazon stated in this new lawsuit that they are doing this because while the total number of fake reviews is very small, it does, “undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon’s brand.”
It will likely be a while before we hear any progress about the case. What may occur sooner, however, is Fiverr may begin taking down this type of service. It is already against Fiverr’s policy to offer jobs that break the TOS of third party sites, so they could easily just remove these services to help ensure Amazon does not begin to target Fiverr itself with lawsuits.
The bottom line for marketers is you want to make sure you’re not paying for fake reviews of products being sold on Amazon. It could end up being far more trouble than it is worth.
