Two weeks ago, I received this package at my door. Launch Rocket Catapult Launcher. It came in an Amazon box, it was addressed to me, but I never ordered it.
Nothing happened for a few days. I share my Amazon account with my family, so I just assumed someone else had decided they wanted a catapult. But then... This came through, the Ring Strike Pro. It's some sort of archery toy.
Completely different Amazon package, completely different day, but still addressed to me. I asked my family about it, nothing. I checked my order history, nothing.
What on earth is going on here? Well, I spent the last two weeks finding out. And one thing is for absolutely sure, it has changed the entire way that I look at and use Amazon. So the very first thing we need to do is to figure out where these products came from.
It's Launch Rocket Catapult Launcher. Oh. Amazon.com, this is our listing. It had 44 ratings, almost 5 stars across the board, and these are verified purchases too, so it doesn't seem like anything dodgy is going on.
What about the other... Oops. The other product, the RingStrike Pro.
There we go. Wait, 4.9 stars! That's literally the highest rating I think I've ever seen on an Amazon product. And the reviews are all just reinforcing how perfect everything was.
How it arrived on time, how everything was as described, how it's durable, how fun it is for the kids. Well... Let's test that theory.
I won't lie to you, I'm actually quite excited for this. I never really grow out of toys. To strap these to your feet, this feels like a bit of a trip hazard. I'm just gonna get the rocket. So you basically hook the rocket like this.
Oh, this feels so scary. I feel like the band's gonna snap any second now. Whoa. And then for this one, you put the dart through, you pull it back, and that should automatically create all the elastic we need.
Really hate pulling elastic. Okay, that was pretty fun. I mean, don't get me wrong, I had an extremely good time with these toys. They're fun, but still, 4.9 stars is insane. So my first thought was, oh, is this company sending out free samples to get reviews?
Or worse yet, are they buying reviews? The answer in this case is no, I was way off the mark. There's actually something far creepier going on with these products. But on the way to that answer, I did learn something about paid reviews that I think you should know. And that's just how easy it is to get them.
See, my initial plan was to quickly make a private seller account, see if I could list my cat Milo as an item, and then pay someone to fake review him with five stars, which would be crazy because if they actually knew him, they would give him a one, maybe a 1.5. However, I will give Amazon this. they've now made sure you have to jump through a lot of hoops to be a seller.
Like, this isn't even a comprehensive list, but you need at the very minimum a government ID, bank account, chargeable credit card, and your phone number. It's enough measures that if you were just an amateur trying to be a very minor nuisance, then... it would probably put you off.
That's me in this instance. So I decided to fake it. I wanted to try and find the worst rated product on Amazon, pretend like it was my listing, and then see how simple it would be to pay someone to change that. So I decided to pick gaming consoles. That'll be fun, right?
Well, for some bizarre reason, Amazon does not let you sort by the lowest rated products first, only the highest rated. So I had to do that and then manually scrub through 81 pages until I finally got to this. The USB Retro Games console, which according to the single review that currently existed, does not work.
So if I type into Google right now, buy Amazon reviews. How to buy reviews for Amazon proven hacks. There are literally hundreds of these sites. Okay, so I've added one of these review sellers on WhatsApp. They always tend to give out WhatsApp numbers, I guess because they deal internationally.
And I've just messaged them to say, hi, I'm interested in your services. Could we hop on a call to talk more? One's just replied to say yes. They're calling me now. Hi, how are you?
How many reviews have you got on your product? Do you want to remove the pattern or do you want to add more positive reviews? Wow, you can remove the bad one? We can try.
How many positive reviews can you add? How many you need? 50 or 100? Yes, I can do it. You need verified, then you have to pay us the item purchase cost and the review cost, which looks like expensive.
For each verified review, you have to actually buy the product. Yeah. You can provide me review content, so I will use them to post there. Or if you don't want, then I will write for a message. We can finish 100 reviews in 30 days.
Thank you very much. I'll get back to you. Cheers.
Bye. Whoa. That is far worse than I was expecting and far easier than I was expecting. This is just one of what feels like an unlimited number of companies offering the same services.
Like this one here called Amazon Organic Review Service. services, you do realize what they're doing is like the exact opposite of an organic review. Wait, you can even buy negative reviews for your competitors'products. This is crazy.
I find it absolutely hilarious that the site that is actually selling you fake reviews is displaying how good its own customer reviews are. Like, what are the chances that these are legitimate? So this doesn't answer the mystery of the Catapult Launcher or the RingStrike Pro just yet. But the point is, while Amazon is clamping down on paid reviews, there is still a thriving market for them.
And it's all because of the simple fact that reviews have a high monetary value to businesses. I mean, there's surveys that show that 80% of Amazon users don't buy a product until they've looked at the reviews. And so in a very real way, reviews equal cash. And yet they're just too easy to make.
All you need for a review is to have an account and you click write review. So there is an oversupply, which was probably why a 2020 analysis of Amazon reviews, which trawled through over 700 million of them, found that 42% were fake. I mean, in the last year alone, Amazon has sued over 10,000 Facebook group admins who've been involved in coordinating and managing fake reviewers, which on one hand sounds great, you know, they're taking action. But then you think, man, if they shut down 10,000, what's the total number of them that are still operating?
Amazon has over 2 million sellers, each with their own library of products, all ever changing. They just, they can't keep a lid on all of it. But there's a new player that's just joined the mix in the last couple of years, AI. We already know at this point that AI is an incredible tool for generating images and music and even jokes, but with that power also comes the ability to write reviews.
And this changes the entire paradigm of fake reviews because in the time that it would have previously taken a person to write one, you can now write 50. So I've just opened up BARD, which is Google's AI. Write me a positive review about a kid's toy that is a catapult launcher. Go.
So even though the brief I gave it gives basically no detail about the product itself, the AI can just fill in the gaps for you. It's a great way for kids to have fun and get some exercise. That's basically what half the Amazon reviews were saying.
This is a thing happening right now. How do we know? Well, because some sellers don't check the output.
There's a classic line that ChatGPT often uses when it's trying to give context on where it sits on something. It says, as an AI language model. Well, look at enough Amazon reviews nowadays, you will see this line. You can find it on waist trimmers.
You can find it on books. You can find it on maternity shorts. And sometimes you can see they've even accidentally left in the part that shows what prompt they asked the AI to get the response that they got, which is the epitome of a joke.
Now, don't get me wrong. Amazon is trying to fight back. They've introduced a scheme called Amazon Vine, a program where Amazon themselves handpicks a bunch of people to become members, almost like becoming a friend to Amazon, or as some might say, a primate. And those members can select any product they like, they can get it for free, and then they can leave a review that gets labeled as Vine Customer Review of Free Product.
So if you find a review that's labeled as a Vine review, you can somewhat rest easy knowing that that review is Amazon certified. Plus, they've also built an AI of their own that looks at how many reviews an account is leaving, the patterns in which sellers'profiles they're being left on to try and weed out the fake from the real. But I mean, that call I had earlier with the fake reviewer was a... I mean, it's a prime example of how it doesn't really work. It's a minefield out there.
I mean, the general consensus online is that if you actually want to be sure, then you should paste the link of a product into Fakespot, which looks like it uses an AI that looks at the reviews and picks up on suspicious grammatical errors. So, let me try and search up these two products on Fakespot to see if it flags anything. You just paste the URL in there, hit Enter, it says B, which, according to these guys, is a pass.
But then, I guess the question becomes, how does Fakespot work? I have no idea. They don't explain what exactly the algorithm looks at, and they just expect you to take their rating at face value.
So after this, I decided to look into FakeSpot some more, and turns out it's pretty fake... at spotting. It's got less than two stars on Trustpilot, with a lot of sellers commenting on forums that reviews they know are real are being flagged by it as fake. A lot of those sellers then recommended ReviewMeta.
which is a more advanced tool. It looks at the number of unverified purchases, similarities in the word count of the reviews, even things like phrase repetition, and it even shows you graphs of when each review was left so you can see if they're all clustered at once, and so on. And I will admit, this tool is pretty cool.
So I was looking at buying a new office chair for my editor recently. I pasted the link for it in here, and it managed to flag that 30% of the thousands of reviews left for it were left by people who'd never reviewed another product. That's enough more than the normal for the site to be like, hold up. this is unusual behavior.
There's a decent chance that the seller of this listing is asking people to review it or potentially even financially encouraging people to review it. But again, the listings for these two products got a pass. And ReviewMeter itself, while scoring better than Fakespot, is still barely breaking three stars on Trustpilot. Meaning that essentially there isn't currently a reliable tool out there for you to know for sure if a review is genuine. The best thing you can do right now is just use your intuition.
actually read the review and check to see if it mentions features that are specific to the thing you're looking at. The vaguer the review is, the less likely it's written by someone who's actually used it. But it gets dodgier.
Because the more I I've delved into the manipulation of reviews, the more I've realized how much power the sellers have to bait and switch. I've spent far too much time browsing Amazon for this video, but if you're finding it useful, then, you know, we're trying to beat Apple in subscribers. We're really, really close. So a sub to the channel would be Amazon.
Anyway, it's become an incredibly widespread tactic on Amazon to when a new version of a product comes out, or you just find yourself with a product that has a higher profit margin that you want to shift more of, then instead of deleting one of your existing listings and therefore all of the positive reviews that you've accumulated through it, you can just update it and change the details to those of your new product. So this is what an Amazon seller's dashboard will look like. And within each product, you can then click on edit. And then when you click that, you can change.
Everything! Like, the vital info would be the core details that you'd see on first glance, like the title of the listing. But you can change the description, you can change the images, you can add variations, and here is where you change the price.
And you might think, well, of course you can, that's totally fair. And there are plenty of sellers who use these tools for the benefit of the customer. But it's just really easy to exploit if you wanted to. It creates three potential problems.
One, that sellers can sell something that they know will get great reviews, create a popular listing, and then swap the product out for something that's not as good for the customer, but that they will make more money from. Two, the fact that sellers can freely adjust the price means that they can sell a product incredibly cheap, rake in those positive reviews, because naturally everything's better when it's cheap, and in a review, everything is judged by the customer. relative to the price.
And then once you have the reviews, pump up the price. And every new customer who comes onto that page is gonna read the reviews and assume that those reviews are based on the price that the product is currently at. And then if you say buy that product and you think it's actually not worth the money you paid, you might well assume that it's probably just you and you're less likely to make a big deal about it because, well, everyone else seems to like it.
And then the third thing is that so many sellers have been caught out trying to list multiple separate products as if they're variations of one product. So you know when you're looking for something to buy, the variations feature is meant to be there so that sellers can add in a few color options or size options. But sellers have realized that if they sell something people like, let it build up a load of positive feedback and then a good ranking, they can then later on just add new products in as variations to the existing listing and make more money from it. All of this is happening today.
And while I think Amazon is trying, I mean, they did just sue the Bountiful Food Supplement Company for doing this exact thing. they just need to do more. For example, they should be making it really clear when someone writes a review, what product price that review is based on. Like no review checking website is gonna be able to pick up on these bait and switch tactics. You've just got to be aware that they exist and just make sure that the reviews are talking about the specific products that you think you're buying.
But the single most curious and devious strategy being used by these Amazon sellers, and what seems like it's happened here and here, is what's known as a... brushing scam. So you know how Amazon is employing their own AI now, which can very quickly figure out if you or someone linked to you is trying to game the system.
Well, brushing can turn a random stranger into the person who's doing the gaming on your behalf. The idea is that every now and again, data leaks occur. Your address, for example, that you've entered into a site will just be propelled into the public. This will be often collated by a broker who will then sell that data to, in this case, a seller or someone that the seller has hired to promote their listing.
Armed with your details then, this person can send out a product to that address using the Amazon shipping program and mark it as a gift. Which means that even though the product hasn't been purchased, it creates a real Amazon tracking number and therefore, technically, when it gets delivered and then not returned, a verified buyer who can leave a verified review. You don't do anything.
They'll be leaving themselves the review. You're just there as the object sitting in the middle to be able to prove that a delivery has occurred. And because this wouldn't be a paid review or an AI-generated review, no external site is going to be able to pick it up. This would be a human just writing the review as if they were you. And here's the kicker.
It doesn't need to be a review for the product you've received. The company doesn't need to ship you the thing that they're writing the review for. They just have to do something cheap that they can do in bulk.
Hence. These things. So I've been sitting here analyzing these specific toys and their listings and the reviews left on those listings to try and figure out what fakery has occurred, when actually the reviews written on my behalf may well not have been on these listings at all, but instead on any of 15 million different products right now, and there is absolutely no way that I could find out which.
Now, while obviously there are far worse scams to be a part of than ones that get you products for free, receiving unsolicited packages from an Amazon seller is a pretty good sign that you've been part of a data leak. Which is why it's so important to set up some sort of safeguard. Like, for me, Surfshark Alert. It's a two-pronged attack.
It'll A check how many times a password you want to use has been breached, and therefore how vulnerable an account is. But then B, if anything does still happen to your email, your address, your credit card details, it'll let you know so that you can do something about it. Like shoot them with a foam dart.
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