
Ask HN: What's the State of the Art in Fake Amazon Reviews? - bespoke_engnr
I was just browsing Amazon&#x27;s black Friday sale, and came across a product with high-quality fake (I think?) reviews. I almost fell for it:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Soundbar-UPGRADED-Surround-Theater-Bluetooth&#x2F;product-reviews&#x2F;B076DXH4WP&#x2F;<p>There&#x27;s a huge burst of product reviews from Nov. 21st, all from &#x27;verified&#x27; purchases, all from accounts with a female first name and exactly 3 product reviews.<p>Is this the current state of the art in fake amazon reviews? How can they not be detecting this as anomalous? Is there a semi-reliable way of detecting this kind of thing or do I have to be insanely vigilant all the time?<p>Or is it just a coincidence, and I&#x27;m being too paranoid?
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chatmasta
FakeSpot agrees with you:
[https://www.fakespot.com/product/soundbar-2018-upgraded-
surr...](https://www.fakespot.com/product/soundbar-2018-upgraded-surround-
sound-bar-home-theater-system-with-wired-tf-card-bluetooth-speaker-wireless-
surround-sound-bar-for-tv-pc-cellphone-tablet-nakalight-remote-control-black)

~~~
bespoke_engnr
I _love_ this, thanks! I was actually just thinking of trying to design
something similar and expose it as a browser plugin. Nice!

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dfraser992
I did my dissertation on this very topic (coming soon to my website... at some
point). I do not know what tactics or systems Amazon has that deal with fake
reviews, or if they even really bother beyond the easy wins like tracking IPs.
My dissertation was on textual analysis, which is the hard part - the other
signals like IP and behavioral related ones (like # of reviews posted in one
day) are more fruitful.

The heuristic you seem to be using is a logical one, but requires more data
analysis than Amazon might be willing to put effort into. Looking at these
reviews, they are... well, so many on the same day is suspicious. My first
theory is that some fake review writing company got tasked with flooding
Amazon, and so reviews got farmed out to writers. Or someone has invented a
GAN that writes good reviews, or at least a good first draft. I'd have to
analyze the data to have more of an opinion. But yeah, verified purchaser
means little.

The real question is, how economical it is for Amazon to really care about
fake reviews? Buyer beware etc and there are more than enough scams running on
Amazon / EBay / etc that I'm sure they're just treading water all the time.
They have sued review writing outfits, so they care somewhat, but only after
the problem got written up in enough newspapers... It is a hard job, trying to
analyze all the data coming into their systems each day. I'm not sure any
company has really implemented a lot of the research I read about in my
literature survey.

ReviewMeta is another site I'd trust:

[https://reviewmeta.com/blog/faq/](https://reviewmeta.com/blog/faq/)

~~~
bespoke_engnr
This is really interesting, thanks. What's your website? I'd love to see that
dissertation when it's up. Fascinating stuff.

~~~
dfraser992
[https://douglas-fraser.com/datadata/](https://douglas-fraser.com/datadata/)

this will be the blog (at some point). The overall idea of the dissertation
was to see if combining different ways of processing the text of the reviews
(classifiers using features from analysis of the grammar, vocabulary, etc)
into a custom heterogeneous ensemble was better than using one classifier and
the traditional ensemble creation methods (AdaBoost, bagging, etc). I figured
creating a more holistic view of the text would be better; other studies have
done this, but not to the extent I did. And I analyzed exactly why things did
or did not work.

So it was just fundamentally a exercise in NLP; I did not use other signals
like the # of reviews submitted in one day or other things like that. My gut
says this general idea (a more holistic view) would apply to classifying other
text, like fake news. But proving that is yet another project.

I still have a couple more angles (dependency and constituency parsing,
framing) to add to the mix, so I'm not totally done. It will be a long series
of blog articles. And I ended up having to deal with the problem of diversity
vs. accuracy, so the dissertation went down a side road. My supervisor said it
could be two potential papers for publication instead of one... At least I
won't be bored for the next year.

Thanks for your interest! If you send me your email (dfraser@... is mine), I
can send you the PDF, or pointers to other info about the research into fake
reviews in general (e.g. using other signals like # of reviews/day); I'm not
going to get the blog up soon - already dealing with a ML project for Network
Rail here in the UK.

------
eugenekolo2
I reported these (and similar): [https://www.amazon.com/Hiearcool-Canceling-
Bluetooth-Headpho...](https://www.amazon.com/Hiearcool-Canceling-Bluetooth-
Headphones-
Earphones/dp/B075DDD8YJ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1509553517&sr=8-2&keywords=Hiearcool)
a couple weeks ago.

Got a support response telling me to look at verified reviews, and that
basically they don't care and verified is considered legit.

Take a look at the reviews. Every single one is 1 paragraph, from "Firstname
Lastname" names, within last 3months, 5/5 to every review they ever gave, etc.

I dug into this problem, and it seems that they really are verified reviews.
Getting these kind of reviews is costly, the vendor really does suffer an item
loss, but having such positive reviews is worth losing 1000 units or so. I
won't get into details where to buy these fraud reviews, but essentially
there's groups out there on social media websites and specialized websites
that work similarly to those discount click ads for us to get an item sites,
but instead, it's leave positive fake reviews for us and you get the items for
free.

Three weeks now, still nothing done, and still scamming. Good work Amazon
fraud dept.

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nicholas73
Amazon used to arbitrate on products not-as-advertised, but I don't see a link
for that anymore. Now you have to ship it back at your own cost.

Overall the Amazon edge over other retailers has been going down.

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codegladiator
The review index agrees with you it seems [https://thereviewindex.com/us/q/AZ-
US_B076DXH4WP](https://thereviewindex.com/us/q/AZ-US_B076DXH4WP)

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producernyc
Maybe you are right. I'm sure there are ways for people to put fake reviews on
Amazon. Thanks for the heads up!

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byoung2
Does the verified purchase label remain even after the product is returned? I
think it should, in the case that you bought it, honestly reviewed it and then
returned it. But that could be a huge loophole for fake reviewers to exploit.

~~~
i_am_nomad
If the manufacturer buys their own product, then they can (illegally) resell
that product, and the only cost to them is shipping and Amazon’s overhead.

~~~
PeterisP
What's illegal in this resale? The item is in the same condition as before
shipping, it's unpacked, and the only issue is proper accounting/tax treatment
of the purchase payment.

