Amazon Targets Fake Review Fraudsters on Social Media
19.7.2022 07:00:00 EEST | Business Wire | Press release
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today filed legal action against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that attempt to orchestrate fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for money or free products. These groups are set up to recruit individuals willing to post incentivized and misleading reviews on Amazon’s stores in the U.S., the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.
Amazon will use information discovered in this legal action to identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters that haven’t already been detected by Amazon’s advanced technology, expert investigators, and continuous monitoring.
“Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services. “Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”
The fraudsters behind such groups solicit fake reviews for hundreds of products available for sale on Amazon, including car stereos and camera tripods. One of the groups identified in the lawsuit is “Amazon Product Review,” which had more than 43,000 members until Meta took down the group earlier this year. Amazon’s investigations revealed that the group’s administrators attempted to hide their activity and evade Facebook’s detection, in part by obfuscating letters from problematic phrases.
Amazon strictly prohibits fake reviews and has more than 12,000 employees around the world dedicated to protecting its stores from fraud and abuse, including fake reviews. A dedicated team investigates fake review schemes on social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and regularly reports the abusive groups to those companies. Since 2020, Amazon has reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Meta. Of these, Meta has taken down more than half of the groups for policy violations and continues to investigate others.
Amazon was a pioneer of product reviews, having introduced them in 1995 to help customers make more informed shopping decisions. The company aims to ensure every review that appears in its stores is trustworthy and reflects an actual customer experience. Amazon’s expert investigators use industry-leading tools to detect and block fake reviews. As a result, Amazon proactively stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews in 2020 alone.
Today’s legal action is the latest step by Amazon aimed at stopping fraudsters who attempt to post fake reviews in Amazon’s stores. In the past year, legal action from Amazon has shut down multiple major review brokers targeting customers in the U.S., the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
However, the nefarious business of brokering fake reviews remains an industry-wide problem, and civil litigation is only one step. Permanently ridding fake reviews across retail, travel, and other sectors will require greater public-private partnership, including collaboration between the affected companies, social media sites, and law enforcement, all focused on a goal of greater consumer protection. Amazon remains eager to continue to partner with all the relevant stakeholders to achieve that mutual goal.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220718005747/en/
Contact information
Amazon.com, Inc.
Media Hotline
Amazon-pr@amazon.com
www.amazon.com/pr
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
The Global Photonics Community Converges in San Francisco as More Than 23,000 Register for Photonics West 20263.2.2026 23:14:00 EET | Press release
SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, brought the global optics and photonics community to San Francisco, California, for another successful and enlivening Photonics West. With more than 23,000 registrants, the annual conference and exhibition connected attendees from 40 countries, showcasing the transnational and collaborative spirit of the interdisciplinary industry. The dynamic event ran from 17 to 22 January, with 4,200 technical presentations across 100 conferences, 4 stages of industry-focused panels and presentations, 49 courses, and approximately 1,600 exhibitors in the five expos: Photonics West, BiOS, Quantum West, AR | VR | MR, plus, in its inaugural year, Vision Tech. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260203925940/en/ Attendees of the 2026 SPIE Photonics West fill the Moscone Center, where nearly 1,600 exhibitors showcased their products. With an emphasis on the application of adv
Vena To Acquire Acterys, Creating a New Category of Enterprise Performance Management: Orchestrated Planning3.2.2026 18:00:00 EET | Press release
Vena, the only complete FP&A platform powered by agentic AI and purpose-built to amplify the Microsoft technology ecosystem, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Managility Pty Ltd, operating as Acterys (“Acterys”), the industry’s leading Power BI–based operational planning and app development platform, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approval. This acquisition unlocks a category-defining way for enterprises to combine planning, analytics, and application development within the Microsoft tools they already trust to run their business. By combining Vena’s Excel-native financial planning and analysis (FP&A) capabilities with Acterys’ proprietary Power BI write-back engine and unified analytics within Microsoft Fabric, Vena is creating the first Microsoft-native environment for Orchestrated Planning, an operating model that moves organizations beyond integrated planning into fully orchestrated and agentic AI-powered execution. Orches
Volante Technologies named a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Banking Payment Hub Platforms3.2.2026 17:15:00 EET | Press release
Volante Technologies, the global leader in Payments as a Service (PaaS), today announced its recognition as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Banking Payment Hub Platforms, which evaluates vendors based on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. In Volante’s view, Gartner positioned them as a Leader based on their capacity to support enterprise-scale payment processing in banks and financial institutions across multiple regions, deployment models, and operational environments. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260203149834/en/ This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. As the highest positioned provider in Ability to Execute, Volante believes its AI-poweredPayments Platform is ISO 20022 native and provides complete, always-on, and composable payment processing support and can be deployed p
Toptal Ranked #1 Most Reliable Professional Services Company in America by Newsweek3.2.2026 17:00:00 EET | Press release
Toptal, the world’s largest fully remote workforce, has been ranked the #1 most reliable professional services company in America on the America’s Most Reliable Companies 2026 list by Newsweek and Statista. The list ranks top US companies based on trust, dependability, and consistent performance in their industry. In Newsweek’s ranking of 300 companies across all industries, Toptal took 10th place, right behind Bank of America and Oracle, which tied for 9th. As the most reliable professional services organization in America, Toptal, which ranked 11th in absolute rankings across all companies, placed well ahead of companies like Accenture (33), Deloitte (39), and Cognizant (66). The America’s Most Reliable Companies 2026 ranking is based on an independent survey of more than 80,000 evaluations submitted by 2,400 business decision-makers at America’s largest companies, including Apple, Dropbox, Johnson & Johnson, and UPS, making this recognition an especially meaningful indicator of prod
HTEC Research Reveals the Real AI Scaling Challenge: It’s Not the Technology3.2.2026 16:46:00 EET | Press release
AI has moved from ambition to action. Every organization is deploying it. Yet for most enterprises, the real challenge is only just beginning. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260203951136/en/ HTEC, a global AI‑first provider of software and hardware design and engineering services, released Executive Summary: A Cross‑Industry View of the State of AI in 2025, a global research report capturing how senior executives are navigating the next phase of AI transformation—and why scaling value remains elusive. Today, HTEC, a global AI‑first provider of software and hardware design and engineering services, released Executive Summary: A Cross‑Industry View of the State of AI in 2025, a global research report that captures how senior executives are navigating the next phase of AI transformation—and why scaling value remains elusive. Based on insights from 1,529 C‑suite executives worldwide, the research offers one of th
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom