An overly complimentary review or, on the contrary, a real rant towards a product? On Amazon, product sheet reviews are countless (1.5 billion in 2022 alone according to Amazon) and often allow consumers to choose when making a purchase.
But these reviews can sometimes be misleading and written by a fake consumer. According to Which?, a British consumer association surveyed by the BBCIn the UK alone, about one in seven online reviews are believed to be fake.
“Fake review brokers”
For this reason, the e-commerce giant has decided to strengthen the use of its artificial intelligence “fraud detectors”, especially in view of its progress in recent months. Amazon would have invested in machine learning models to study hundreds of points to detect if a review is suspicious or not. For example, the AI analyzes the identity of the author of the comment, his activity on the platform, his previous reviews and any other behavior that it deems unusual.
The company points out in particular the significant use of social networks and encrypted messaging to prepare these false opinions upstream, usually carried out in exchange for money or free products.
200 million fake reviews in 2022
But Amazon wants to invest even more in these types of tools to protect its buyers and sellers. Because the products that collect the most false opinions are usually those of poor quality, non-compliant or even dangerous. Their sales also explode during major shopping periods, such as sales, Black Friday, or Christmas.
Amazon thus claimed in 2022 the blocking of more than 200 million opinions suspected of being false as well as the complaint of 46 million people who wrote false opinions.
In July 2022, the platform had filed a complaint against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook accounts at the origin of false opinions. In all of 2022, Amazon filed lawsuits against 90 “bad actors who provided fake reviews.” However, 2023 is likely to be a record year: the company has already sued 97 entities since the beginning of the year, in China, the United States and Europe.
Source: BFM TV
