Apparently, Amazon’s fake review complex has been around for a while. It is said to be one of the e-commerce giant’s biggest concerns. Nowadays, users are reportedly suspicious of the coveted “Amazon’s Choice” label as well. Despite a crackdown by Amazon, sellers on the platform are continuing to purchase fake reviews for around 15 euro each (about Rs 1,200), according to a leading British daily’s latest investigation.
The companies selling fake reviews to sellers rely on an army of "testers" who buy the products to post the four and five-star reviews online, said the report on Sunday. The testers get the refund for the cost of purchasing the products, in addition to a small fee. These testers buy the products so that the reviews they post get classified as "Amazon Verified Purchases".
One review firm, AMZTigers of Germany boasts of deploying 3,000 testers in the UK alone. "We help you get verified reviews from real people. Our more than 60,000 product testers throughout Europe specialise in writing reviews quickly and reliably," according to the website of the company.
Amazon said it was committed to protecting the integrity of reviews and had spent 300 million pounds in the past year to protect customers from abuse, fraud and other forms of misconduct."Our objective is to catch and remove abusive reviews before a customer ever sees it and in the last month, over 99 per cent of the reviews read by the customers were authentic," an Amazon spokesman was quoted as saying.