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Tell HN: Amazon claims "Zero tolerance for fake reviews"

22 points by leobg ↗ HN
Noticed this for the first time today on Amazon.de:

> Zero Tolerance for Fake Reviews > Our goal is to ensure that every review is trustworthy and useful. For this reason, we use both technology and human investigators to block fake reviews before customers ever see them. > We lock Amazon accounts that violate our community guidelines. We also block sellers who purchase reviews and take legal action against parties that offer these reviews. Learn how you can report. [0]

[0] https://www.amazon.de/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GLHXEX85MENUE4XF

19 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] thread
Zelphyr
Lol. Amazon doesn’t care. This is pure PR. I bought a refurbished Nest Protect from them once. It had a giant “Certified Inspected by Amazon” sticker right in the box with a First Alert smoke detector nestled inside.

Amazon got conned and decided to pass it on to their customer.

chrisjj
No more reviews from me then. It is not worth the risk of my whole account being locked for a single false positive.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
hash07e
"I have contacted the seller and all was good"

The customer that got a gift card of 50$ to change a review

zelphirkalt
Maybe one could make a business out of that. Intentionally buy products from such companies on Amazon and leave a bad review, to then accumulate those 50$s. Only need to find products inexpensive enough and probably need a good VPN and multiple accounts ... Hm well, maybe difficult to get to a net plus with that.
al_borland
Last week I got a letter in the mail from a company I bought something from on Amazon months ago. They were offering me $30 for a positive review. I immediately reported them to Amazon, but it feels like throwing a thimble of water on a forest fire, even if they take action (which I have no way of knowing).

If it was within the return windows, and the item was huge, I’d return it. I have no interest in having products from companies they participate in this type of thing.

tass
I had a company reach out after a year offering a refund for toner cartridges I left a bad review for.

I took the refund of course (since they were bad) and then they offered me another $30 to adjust the negative review which I left up, which when I ignored they upped it to $40 to remove it altogether.

I didn’t take them up on it, but I imagine they’re very successful offering such high a payment.

al_borland
I didn’t even leave a bad review (I didn’t leave one at all), which is why I was so surprised to get the letter.

I’m sure the tactic is very successful overall. I’m curious what percentage of the population will turn down free money to stay true to their values. The item I bought was $140. I’m not going to sell out over $140, even if they offered a full refund.

I was planning to buy some other stuff that matched, but they lost all figure sales from me.

op00to
That company now has to open a whole new business account which probably takes them all of 15 minutes! Thank goodness for Amazon doing Something!

(Seriously though, might as well make it hard for these hucksters! I’d give you a high five for reporting ‘em)

rasz
They mean reviews where you warn others about receiving fake product.
Rebelgecko
Amazon has deleted my reviews when I mentioned that tucked into the item's manual was a card saying that the manufacturer would pay $5 for reviews
explorigin
Same. I recently added a similar review that never got published. When I try to make another review of it, I see:

"We apologize but Amazon is not accepting reviews on this product from this account. If you would like to contact us about this decision, please email community-help@amazon.com."

zelphirkalt
Also zero tolerance for negative but truthful reviews. Please only say nice things and only write positive reviews haha.
malfist
Have you noticed their AI summaries of reviews almost never mention a negative?
wojciii
I stopped using (German) Amazon as their search gives me so many Chinese shit products and no method of removing Chinese sellers from the search results.

It's not that I dislike Chinese as such, but there are so many bad products that I've given up.

KomoD
> no method of removing Chinese sellers from the search results

I don't think there'd be much left if you were to remove them, so much of Amazon is just Chinese products and sellers

wojciii
There are German sellers on Amazon. I would like to buy from sellers located in Europe as if gives me certain rights.
flowzai
By increasing their trustworthiness on products, Amazon is ranked higher on search engines.
amznburn
Do we get to sue Amazon when we discover they've lied (again)?