Amazon has initiated legal actions against more than 1,000 unidentified people whom the company primarily claims to provide "false, misleading and inauthentic" reviews on the U.S. version of its website.
The complaint was filed on Oct. 16 at the Seattle State Court. The lawsuit takes its aim on an increasing malpractice in online shopping where people put up good reviews for certain products and make money out of it.
The said online malpractice is done by having these fake consumers write impressive comments about a particular merchandise, although they have never even really tried it out. Some corporations take advantage of these fake write-ups and also boost their trades by commission-basis to the corresponding bogus writers.
Majority of online buyers rely on consumer evaluations -- be it a hotel room, a restaurant dish or even an iPhone case. Forrester Research states that about 45 percent of online shoppers consider product testimonies before buying a product online. Retailers on the Internet try to take advantage of such illegitimate write-ups to boost their sales.
Aside from Amazon, TripAdvisor and Yelp also depend on customer online feedback. These sites use computer processes and a roster of investigators to look for fraud reviews.
On April 2015, Amazon filed charges against the sites that offered to write fraudulent feedback on its products. In its latest complaint, the company was against certain fraudulent writers who happened to have accounts on Fiverr.com.
The charges claim that Fiverr writers promised Amazon that it can generate reviews on its products online through a bogus user. In a variety of circumstances, the sellers will be asked by the writers to generate the review and put a fake user name as the consumer, according to NBC News.
A consumer who purchases a product on the Amazon website is considered a verified person who in return can write something about the product. Merchandisers asking for bogus reviews for their products are only one of the many problems most online marketing platforms have to deal with.
