
How Scammers in China Manipulate Amazon [video] - juokaz
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-scammers-in-china-manipulate-amazon-11545044402
======
cs702
The video is must-watch for those who are unfamiliar with the many ways in
which shady vendors game Amazon's systems to scam customers.

Speaking as a longtime Amazon customer:

* I do feel the authenticity of products in some categories can no longer be taken for granted on Amazon. For example, if I search for electronics, the search results look like "a sea of endless crap," full of the kinds of products you might find at a counterfit-goods store in a shady part of town.

* Product search no longer works as well as it did in the past for me. Frequently, I find myself having to invest time and effort to identify which items are of decent or good quality in that "sea of endless crap." I find myself having to click on results and scan descriptions to find products that are sold "by Amazon" instead of third parties, to minimize worry.

* Product reviews and ratings no longer seem trustworthy. It's not just that there are large operations cranking out fake reviews every day,[a] but that I often find it time-consuming to sort out which reviews are true versus fake. Fake reviewers seem to be getting better and better at fooling human beings.

Over the past year, I've started going to local "brick and mortar" retailers
like Best Buy more and more, because I find they provide a better-curated
shopping experience. There are fewer products from which to choose, but I feel
more certain that they're authentic and of known quality.

I'm hoping Amazon will address all these issues... soon.

[a] For example, see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262101)

~~~
notus
I had a recent scenario lately where I bought a small consumer electronic
device through Amazon based off of reviews. There were thousands of reviews
for this item at the time of purchase. Once the item arrived I realized it
didn't work so I went back to the Amazon page and there was now only one 1
star review which was someone wondering what happened to all the reviews that
were there a few days ago.

There are some questionable things going on with dog food as well. For example
I recently purchased a case of a certain dog food my dog has been eating for
years. If I click on the product link in my Amazon order history it says that
it is sold by the manufacturer of the dog food, but in the Amazon order
history itself it says a different store that I've never heard of. The inside
of the can looked a little different, less gravy and it made my dog start
vomiting almost immediately.

~~~
Antonio123123
The same product can be sold by both amazon and 3rd party. The reviews will be
mixed together.

Ex: amazon sells tshirt. People post reviews. 3rd party sells tshirt with the
same product page as amazon's and the quality is poor. Reviews are mixed
together and you can't see the seller on which the review is based.

~~~
fouc
Doesn't amazon make it fairly obvious when you're ordering from a 3rd party or
not?

There's still a measure of control in who the supplier is, and the reviews for
that supplier too.

~~~
briffle
Your missing the key part. You can order from the manufacturer through amazon,
and they will ship you the part from the 3rd party (that may or may not be
legitimate) if the have the same ID number. Even though you ordered from the
manufacturer, you may get a fake product. They commingle inventory, to make it
easier for them to ship from nearest warehouse, but don't really put enough
work into ensuring the products are actually identical.

~~~
snaky
The funny thing is Chinese e-shops don't do that. You can find a bunch of the
same goods at e.g. JD but if you buy from the JD itself ("Joy Collection" in
the English JD frontend joybuy.com), it would never be fake and it would never
be co-mingled - and the reviews are separated too.

------
segfaultbuserr
This article talks about the fraudulent practices by the vendors.

But this title made me think of the fraudulent practices by the buyers. It's a
well-known problem in China, a small percentage of scammers will always try to
abuse the system to its knees, as a result, vendors are forced to end their
favorable policies (e.g. RMA), effectively causing a Denial-of-Service of
convenient and high-quality services to the majority, legitimate customers. It
is not limited to vendors, customer, but also widespread in the public
services and financial sector. I think this is called a "low-trust society".

I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution.
Unfortunately, this type proposal has been intentionally scaled-up by the
government, leads to the upcoming "social credit system", based on mass
surveillance.

And I think nowadays this approach as a solution is a dead-end, any similar
system proposed by a government or a corporation will eventually become a mass
surveillance system. Even the """relatively""" harmless financial credit
system seems to go out of control, and a more concerning issue is that, unlike
the Anti-Encryption Bill, a trust-based system can be legitimate, and solves
real, severe problems, making it harder to argue against mass surveillance
systems in disguise of trust and credit.

~~~
duxup
Is the fraud that much worse in China than in the US?

Plenty of places have friendly policies and are taken advantage of by a few,
but they keep the policy because people like it.

There always will be those people.

I often hear "oh we can't do that, people will take advantage of it" then
someone comes along and somehow doesn't go under and does well.

I think sometimes people and businesses are far more fearful of a potential
risk than the actual impact.

~~~
21
> _Plenty of places have friendly policies and are taken advantage of by a
> few, but they keep the policy because people like it._

It's changing:

> _Every time shoppers return purchases to Best Buy Co. BBY -2.65% , they are
> tracked by a company that has the power to override the store’s touted
> policy and refuse to refund their money. That is because the electronics
> giant is one of several chains that have hired a service called Retail
> Equation to score customers’ shopping behavior and impose limits on the
> amount of merchandise they can return._

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-your-returns-are-used-
again...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-your-returns-are-used-against-you-
at-best-buy-other-retailers-1520933400)

~~~
hannasanarion
That's not a change, that's how it's supposed to work. You keep the policy
that people like, and track down the people who are abusing it. When I worked
retail in 2012-2013 we took the drivers license numbers of people who returned
items so that we could identify suspicious activity.

------
_nickwhite
Since I haven't seen it posted yet, an invaluable tool for sifting through
fake vs real Amazon reviews is fakespot.com. They use AI to score every
product and crawl an item's review tree (reviews left by the same people for
other products) to verify the authenticity of individual reviewers. I've
sifted out a lot of shady products AND sellers using this. (I'm not affiliated
in any way with them.)

~~~
jeron
if Amazon doesn't want to address this issue by fixing its reviews, it should
just acquire/incorporate Fakespot itself

~~~
tachyonbeam
It seems to me like one of the basic things Amazon should do is... Only allow
reviews from people who have actually bought the product, and had time to
receive it in the mail. I know, what a mind boggling concept.

This reminds me of the hateful comments that plague YouTube. Most of them come
from accounts that only ever post hate comments. Would it be so fucking hard
to write a heuristic that tags users constantly getting their comments
downvoted so that someone can review them? Then, if they fail the review, you
mute them for 6 months, delete all their comments, but let them think their
comments are still visible. Maybe let all the haters see each other's comments
and reply to one another so they can live in their own parallel universe of
hate. These problems are not hard to solve. There is a lack of will to solve
them.

~~~
slantyyz
>> Only allow reviews from people who have actually bought the product, and
had time to receive it in the mail. I know, what a mind boggling concept.

Sorry, but that's not going to help at all. After Amazon banned incentivized
reviews, pretty much all the sellers contacted the reviewers to buy products
and then get reimbursed by PayPal. Sure, it's against the rules, but it's not
being enforced.

They're not even hard to spot. I stopped doing incentivized reviews after the
rule change, but I can see that a lot of the other reviewers are still
reviewing a lot of stuff as verified purchasers. I know they're not real
because I turned down offers from sellers to review the same products after
the rule-change.

The worst part is that these reviews are even _less honest_ than when
incentivized reviews were allowed. Not all incentivized reviewers were shills
(I tried hard to review stuff honestly - I would guess maybe a third of
incentivized reviewers did as well). In the post-incentivized-review world,
however, __everyone __who is participating an a verified purchase sham is
giving 5 star reviews.

~~~
tivert
> Sorry, but that's not going to help at all. After Amazon banned incentivized
> reviews, pretty much all the sellers contacted the reviewers to buy products
> and then get reimbursed by PayPal. Sure, it's against the rules, but it's
> not being enforced.

Source for that: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-
merchant...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-merchants-
secretly-use-facebook-to-flood-amazon-with-fake-
reviews/2018/04/23/5dad1e30-4392-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html)

If you have a Facebook account, you can find those groups easily. Though you
may have to search for obfuscations like "AZON".

~~~
slantyyz
While I get that those groups exist, the sellers didn't have to do any new
work to "convert" their existing reviewers.

Most if not all of the top-ranked incentivized reviewers already had
longstanding communications with sellers via email.

------
wdn
I stopped trusting Amazon's review and stop buying unfamiliar brands.

I have seen too many "Amazon's choice" products with few hundreds reviews, all
5 stars, but the problem with these products are they were just listed a day
ago and already got 400 or 500 five stars reviews. Looking at the review, they
were all put on the same day and time. These 500 fives stars review push the
product to the top of the search. Yet, Amazon did nothing about it as long as
the products sell.

I sell only Amazon and I am telling you, I get a product review under 1% of
the sales.

------
oflannabhra
For as much as Bezos bangs the "Customer Obsession" drum, I'm beginning to
doubt any serious product managers have used Amazon in the past few years to
actually buy any simple, everyday items. I've had the following experience for
several device categories: (electronics, tools & hardware, 3rd party phone
cases, etc)

1) Search Amazon with a description (ie, "Qi wireless charging stand"[0])

2) Results are full of clearly duplicated products whose only difference is
the screen printed brand. Sometimes, the Amazon tag of "Amazon's Choice" or
"Best Seller" is applied multiple times on the first page, as a re-brander has
taken over a subcategory that is irrelevant (eg, "Sports-Tennis Equipment").
These results also have ads injected and sometimes even totally irrelevant
categories, deals, etc injected, further confusing the layout.

3) Look at several products pages and am unable to distinguish the differences
or advantages of any. Obviously, most of these products are manufactured in a
handful of OEM factories in China. The brands typically do not match the "sold
by" section of the product page, either, further confusing me.

4) Scroll down to reviews. These are essentially worthless as they have been
gamed to irrelevance. I mostly come down here to see if some angel who
genuinely bought the product for their own use decided to write a review, with
pictures. Even these can't be trusted now, though.

5) Check a review rating site, such as Fakespot, although I generally don't
know what to do regardless of score, besides keep looking. (That is, a good
review typically won't instill enough trust to flip me to "Buy it").

6) Go to Google and search from there. Results are sometimes better, but not
always. I'll check several results.

7) Look at the Wirecutter to see if they address the category. Just buy
whatever they recommend if so.

8) Go to a specific community for recommendations. This would be a subreddit,
looking through a trusted Twitter user, forums, etc.

Now, I mostly skip all this, and my default behavior is to _not trust anything
on Amazon 's website_, and either start my search elsewhere, or buy whatever
is cheapest and save my time. I used to go to Amazon to save time, but now I'd
almost prefer going to Walmart and buying whatever option they have.

[0] - [https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-
alias%3...](https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-
alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Qi+wireless+charging+stand)

------
bitshiffed
I wish Amazon had a better system for reporting these things, that is, if they
cared about the problem enough to implement one. If you contact support they
will take your reports of specific items; but will act on those exact things
reported only, and not bother to dig any deeper (at least, it appears that
way).

This time of year the fake reviews are especially bad as well. For example, if
you go to something like the Electronics › Camera & Photo › Video › Camcorders
category, every top rated item is padded with, or only contains, fake reviews.
They have hundreds of non-verified five star reviews all occurring on a single
day. On a few items you can see where there's a whole series of padded
reviews, than a few bad, real, reviews from the people that fell for it, than
a later series of fake reviews to re-up the score and bury the real ones. Many
of the fake reviews are painfully obvious too, like they know they don't even
need to try to hide it. You can view a users review history by clicking their
name on the review. If you follow most of these fake accounts, all of the
activity they have is unverified 5-star reviews for questionable products
coming all within a sequence of a few days.

If Amazon is using some internal/automated system to detect these things, it
does a fairly horrible job. My guess is its not much of a priority for them
though.

------
bob_theslob646
The question that no one in the thread is addressing is Amazon's thirst for
growth.

By not developing a close to foolproof protocol for detecting and eliminating
'spam' (i.e fake products), this incentives the sellers to keep doing what
they are doing.

I am not saying that this is not an easy problem. It is an incredibly
difficult problem, but what has made Amazon super successful in the past, is
figuring out incredibly difficult problems.

Maybe I am being impatient, but this problem has persisted for quite a long
time. Their are ads everywhere.

I just speak for myself, but having to spend close to an hour sifting out what
is a fake review and what is not, does not encourage trust from me.

I would be really interested what the customer retention is like for people
who have received fake products.

------
kitcar
Also see this podcast from reply all: [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-
all/124](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124)

------
edoo
I use a service that checks the reviews on every Amazon item I'm going to buy
and reject any products with gamed reviews.

In a different tangent I found myself disgusted with AliExpress lately when
every listing I was looking at had semi-related bait items for higher listing
position when sorting by price. Amazon isn't that bad yet.

------
peterwwillis
Recently I was looking for a charger for my Lenovo laptop. On product listings
_from Lenovo 's official account_, I found reviews talking about receiving an
unbranded chinese knock-off (not a Lenovo OEM product). I'd rather pay more
money on some other site to at least get the product I intended to buy.

------
beebmam
I refuse to purchase anything made in China from Amazon anymore. I've bought
one too many extremely shitty (and dangerous) products from Amazon for me to
get bitten again.

------
josefresco
Shout out to [https://reviewmeta.com](https://reviewmeta.com) \- A service I
recently discovered (maybe here!) and have been using for our holiday shopping
needs. My wife now uses it and was horrified at how shady most reviews are.

Note: I have no affiliation with the company.

------
mattbeckman
Anyone currently working on replacing product SKUs with public keys and
verification process on the last hop where only the manufacturer can verify
that a product is brand new?

That has blockchain all over it.

------
dqpb
Why isn't the origin of a product a filter option on Amazon?

------
zachguo
Take a look at Chinese e-commerce sites and learn how they deal with frauds,
they have been dealing with these for more than 10 years.

In terms of technology, one can use machine learning for fraud detection. In
terms of business operation, they have dedicated e-commerce site for official
sellers, and there are several sites aiming up middle class market where
products are curated and QCed by the sites.(sort of higher end Amazon Basics)

------
wonthegame
I worked at a place that was the only seller of a popular product yet it was
sold on my countries amazon. They were about 25% off retail price too. They
used pictures of genuine packaging and genuine items. I’m not so sure that
they sent the customers the real things though.

------
insickness
I use fakespot.com to try to suss out which reviews are reliable. But it's
difficult to tell if Fakespot can be trusted.

------
majortennis
WSJ has a paywall. Anyone got a pastebin of the content?

~~~
eyeareque
Pay walled links should not be allowed here.

~~~
throwawaysea
Why? Some of the best content out there is supported by subscriptions and
deserves discussion as well as financial support.

~~~
eyeareque
That’s fine, but if it’s not publicly accessible don’t advertise the pay for
entry content, the masses can’t view it without waiting for someone to post a
workaround link.

I would be fine with this if the link was to working content (the workaround
link).

------
medmunds
[video]

~~~
dang
Thanks—added.

------
alex_hitchins
I know it is off topic, but has anyone else looked at the source for that
site? I know I'm old school, but really? It's quite absurd the actual content
to payload ratio.

~~~
ams6110
Any newspaper site will be the same or worse.

~~~
alex_hitchins
I agree, they are all very much the same. I just find it a sorry state of
affairs.

