Unmasking the fake review broker

Reviews are a integral part of consumers’ shopping behavior. According to a 2021 study by the Harvard Business Review, 98% of customers read reviews before they shop online and reviews were predicted to influence $3.8 trillion in revenue worldwide. Bad actor activity undermines trust in the reviews experience. It can also manipulate consumer perception in other ways by artificially increasing followers and engagements on social media, which can mislead customers into believing that the feedback is genuine. Honest sellers also face unfair competition from the broker’s activities that can artificially lure potential customers away from their legitimate operations.

This industry is big business; according to a study conducted by the World Economic Forum, the annual direct influence of spending related to fake reviews is estimated to be $152 billion across the globe. In an effort to evade detection, the tactics used by high-volume brokers have become increasingly sophisticated, using advanced technology and social engineering to recruit unsuspecting consumers and business owners to take part in their schemes.

Scope and operations

Fake review brokers are a global, industry-wide problem, impacting the integrity of consumer reviews across multiple sectors, including hospitality, contracted services, medical, dental, retail, travel, and more. Brokers can appear to be legitimate businesses to consumers and sellers and advertise their services through external websites, social media platforms, and encrypted messaging services. The use of third-party platforms makes it difficult to detect, prevent, and penalize these bad actors. In many cases, brokers lead real customers to leave improperly incentivized reviews that appear authentic, but have been created in exchange for money, coupons, free products, or other incentives that are not disclosed in the review.

Activity and avoiding detection

Brokers use an integrated and often sophisticated network of people and technology to scale their abuse across various channels, allowing them to operate in every corner of the world to support their fraudulent schemes. They approach potential reviewers on many different channels, leveraging automation, bots, artificial intelligence, and more to appear as a legitimate business. They can focus on specific demographics and interests and target clients and reviewers through organic and paid search engine results, on social media through groups, communities, and paid ads. Sometimes they even use phone calls and texts, leveraging automated calls, text bots, or call centers. By building and operating large scale-automation applications, brokers can bulk-manage social media groups by sending multiple direct messages to different groups at once, extracting group members’ credentials, and searching the group’s content with specific keywords.

Private and secure messaging

Brokers often coordinate with sellers and reviewers through private or encrypted messaging apps to avoid detection. These apps can have features such as self-destructing messages that prevent visibility into conversations. Further collaboration with governments and private messaging platforms is vital to stopping the abuse orchestrated there.

Holding bad actors accountable

Amazon will continue to hold bad actors accountable to protect our customers and selling partners. We will also continue to protect our stores from fraudulent reviews by investing in proactive tools to detect and stop them from impacting a customer’s buying decision. When we find illegal activity, we go beyond our store, working upstream to identify and dismantle the criminal network at its source, protecting customers whether they are shopping in Amazon stores or elsewhere. See below current legal cases filed by Amazon against fake review brokers and others committing reviews abuse.

Fake review brokers are a global problem, impacting customer reviews across multiple industries, requiring consumer groups, governments, and private sector to work together to stop them and send a clear message that this illicit activity must stop.

Based on what we have learned from our proactive efforts, partnership with others, and enforcement actions, we support greater collaboration across the private and public sector to pursue the following steps and stop fake reviews:

1. Greater information sharing about known bad actors
2. Clearer enforcement authority and greater funding to hold bad actors accountable
3. Better controls for services that facilitate fake review solicitation

We cannot win this fight alone. Only through partnerships with like-minded stakeholders across the private and public sector can we truly stop fake review brokers, address the problem at the source, and help ensure that reviews are trustworthy across the industry.

Read more on our blueprint here.