Amazon Sues Thousands of Facebook Group Admins Over Fake Reviews

Amazon is taking legal action against more than 10,000 Facebook group administrators responsible for an onslaught of fake reviews.

In a press release published Tuesday, the retail giant announced that it had filed lawsuits against admins who “orchestrate fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for money or free products.” These Facebook groups, according to Amazon, regularly organize fraudulent review campaigns that result in skewed—and therefore misleading—product ratings. The issue appears to span multiple countries, with alleged fake reviewers in the US, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the UK.

The groups work by soliciting fake reviews for products sold across Amazon, which the company says includes everything from camera tripods to car stereos. The incentive for posting a fake review is typically money or the product itself. Amazon has explicitly prohibited incentivized reviews since 2016; before that, reviewers who’d received products in exchange for an “honest” review were supposed to disclose it, much like on other websites.

Now Amazon is on a mission to bring integrity back to its product reviews. One of the groups it’s suing, titled “Amazon Product Review,” had more than 43,000 members before Meta removed it earlier this year. But Amazon says an investigation revealed the group’s admin had attempted to hide the group’s activity to “evade Facebook’s detection.” One of the ways it did so was by having members omit letters from targeted phrases—one of the pillars of internet guideline avoidance.

Amazon’s goal isn’t just to seek retribution—it’s also to uncover information about bad actors during the legal process. While Amazon uses technology and internal investigations teams to proactively identify as many fraudulent reviews as possible, some inevitably fall through the cracks. Information gleaned about nefarious Facebook groups and individual accounts during the course of the lawsuits, however, will allow the company to more effectively identify and remove fraudulent reviews going forward.

“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,” Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services, said in the company’s release. “Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”

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