[ad_1]
Amazon filed the first European criminal complaint for fake reviews in Italy; at the same time, the first civil complaint in Spain was also filed. The objective of this legal initiative, which also includes 10 other complaints recently filed in the United States and letters of formal notice to five German sites, aims to dismantle a network of operators who manage over 11,000 sites and groups on social networks dedicated to the production of fake reviews, both on Amazon and on other ecommerce, for a fee or in exchange for free products.
The Italian criminal complaint concerns a broker, whose name has not been revealed, who is accused of having “created a network of people willing to buy products on Amazon and publish 5-star reviews in exchange for a full refund of their purchases”. Amazon says that according to Italian law this type of activity is planned both fines and prison sentences. The Spanish lawsuit concerns Agencia Reviews: here too, the methodology is similar – full refund for a product once a five-star review is published. Communications take place via Telegram, the prosecution argues, so as not to be intercepted and tracked down.
For large ecommerce platforms, user reviews represent both a great added value and a potential danger; and no platform is as big as Amazon. The efforts of the American company have been well known for some time: there is an entire internal division dedicated to countering this type of phenomenon (multiple teams spread around the world for a total of 12,000 people), and over the years the initiatives, legal and otherwise, have multiplied; recently the ban of two well-known brands in the field of cheap tech accessories, namely Aukey and RAVPower, has made a lot of news. The figures of the phenomenon are impressive: TrustPilot eliminated 2.2 million fake reviews in 2020 alone. According to an analysis by the independent entity Fakespot, about 40% of the reviews analyzed turned out to be bogus, with a higher concentration precisely in the ranges lower prices, around 15 to 40 dollars.
Says Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s Vice President of Selling Partner Services:
Ensuring these criminals to justice through legal actions and criminal charges is one of the many important initiatives with which we protect customers so that they can shop with confidence.In addition to continuing to innovate our systems for detecting and preventing false reviews in our store, Amazon will continue relentlessly to identify the evildoers who feed this market and to take action against them. There is no place for fake reviews on Amazon or anywhere else in the industry.
Amazon will continue to devote significant resources to fighting fake reviews and ensuring customers have a reliable shopping experience. We continue to improve our proactive controls, invent new technologies, and use machine learning to detect attackers and find new ways to bring them to justice.
[ad_2]
Source link
