As you probably know, there is a big issue with Amazon reviews not being trustworthy due to a large number of fake reviews placed on products through reviewer manipulation. I have gone quite far down the rabbit hole of the massive fake-review industry, and I would like to share my findings here in the hope that some keyboard vigilantes will help me take down some of these operations.
The way the process usually goes is as follows:
The seller orders a certain number of five-star reviews from a fake review operation.
The manager of the operation sends the orders to freelance workers who attract reviewers, primarily through Facebook and Telegram.
The reviewers are asked to provide the email associated with their PayPal account and the link to their amazon public profile.
The freelance worker sends them a link to the item.
The reviewer orders the item and sends a screenshot of the order confirmation.
All of this information is relayed back to the manager.
After the reviewer receives the item, they write a five-star review.
After the review goes live, the manager checks the reviewer's amazon profile to confirm that a five-star review was written, and sends a full refund for the item to the reviewer, and sometimes an additional commission of around $30
The freelance workers receive a small commission on each review, sometimes less than a dollar.
The manager charges the seller the cost of refunding the reviewers, as well as a commission of a few dollars per review.
Nearly all of the fake review operations are run from China, which is no surprise. They communicate internally through WeChat or Telegram.
They are usually not the brightest, and I have pulled quite a few good ones on these guys, more on that soon.
They are persistent as anything and are constantly hounding reviewers to review more and more items.
They usually want reviews for newly listed items that have no reviews.
Now for what we can do. It's really very simple. You ask to review the items and after they pay out the refund, you delete your five-star review and replace it with an honest one. You report the seller's Amazon accounts to Amazon. You report the PayPal account that you receive the payment from to Paypal. PayPal is especially good with removing scams from their service and often bans their accounts after seeing screenshots of incriminating conversations. It is also quite easy to get these guys to reveal information such as the contact info of their managers and the identity of their other reviewers. They are so gullible that I actually counter-scammed one scammer for hundreds of dollars by claiming that a competing seller was paying me more than he was to change my review. Of course, there was no competing seller, but I wasn't going to let that stop me. I also convinced him to change his name on Telegram to Jedigl Margoon, telling him that it was an American name and would make him sound more trustworthy.
My goal is to make these guys lose so many Amazon and PayPal accounts, and so much money that they will be forced to shut down their operation. I have some big ideas for this project, such a creating a browser plugin that would take data from a database of suspicious sellers and items and warn users of fake reviews before they check out. If you are interested in some scam-baiting (and a whole lot of free Chinese junk) let me know and I can direct you to some of these operations to start on.
