According to the BBC, Amazon is suing the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups. According to the report, the gangs are manufacturing phoney reviews on Amazon marketplaces in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

According to the tech giant, the groups offer money or free goods in exchange for Amazon evaluations. One of the groups, which Facebook’s parent company Meta erased earlier this year, had 43,000 members.

The title was “Amazon Product Review.”

The admins would refund anyone in the group who had purchased specific things and submitted feedback. There was a wide range of merchandise involved, including car stereos and camera tripods.

Large numbers of reviews, particularly favourable ones, increase sellers’ visibility on Amazon’s platforms and elevate them higher in search engine rankings. Amazon retailers can legitimately pay for services that claim to raise their online ratings without knowing that this will be done through the use of phoney reviews.

According to Amazon, the group administrators masked crucial phrases that would otherwise have been highlighted by Meta’s automatic technologies designed to detect rule-breaking.

A Facebook post offering “R*fnd Aftr R*vew” was one example posted (refund after review).

Meta removed approximately half of the groups when Amazon reported them. Amazon, on the other hand, told the BBC that the administrators of all of them were being targeted.

“Pro-active legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon vice president of selling partner services.

The lawsuit was filed in Washington King County, near Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle.

“Groups that solicit or encourage fake reviews violate our policies and are removed. We are working with Amazon on this matter and will continue to partner across the industry to address spam and fake reviews,” Meta said in a statement.

Amazon sued four organisations earlier this year, accusing them of purposefully overloading its retail platform with bogus reviews. Paying someone to produce or host bogus reviews would be unlawful under new suggestions being considered in the UK.

(Adapted from BBC.com)

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