Amazon Brushing Scam Sign Up: How The Scam Works
The Amazon brushing scam sign up is a new, fraudulent technique perpetrating online, making it very important to know how to tell if Amazon reviews are real. New services such as Amazon Vine and AMZDiscover also became part of the game. Let’s take a closer look at this phenomenon, which adds more to the list of Amazon scams. Pay attention.
If you have an Amazon membership, before buying a product, you check out the reviews first, right? You purchase according to these evaluations, yes? Well, what if we tell you that tons of reviews you trust for some products are absolute garbage? Here is more.
There is a thing called ‘Amazon Brushing’, which has been spreading like an epidemic lately, making buyers around the world purchase products that are not really what they’re advertised as. What is Amazon Brushing and how are the Amazon Vine and AMZDiscover related?
Watch the video below to see in action the Amazon Brushing Scam Sign Up scheme exposed:
The Amazon Brushing scam sign up applies to products that are smaller and cheaper mostly. What questionable sellers do is purchase their own products as ‘gifts’ and send them to random addresses to individuals they find on the Internet. They could even buy these lists with victims from third-parties.
On the other hand, there are two platforms that make a difference: Amazon Vine and AMZDiscover. Let’s look, quickly:
Amazon Vine
According to Amazon’s official website, “Amazon Vine invites the most trusted reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make informed purchase decisions. Here is more: Amazon invites customers to become Vine Voices based on their reviewer rank, which is a reflection of the quality and helpfulness of their reviews as judged by other Amazon customers. Amazon provides Vine members with free products that have been submitted to the program by participating vendors.”
AMZDiscover
What is AMZDiscover? AMZDiscover is an online search engine that can help you find the Amazon reviewers and potential customers. How? Copy and paste the URL of an Amazon product listing and click on the search button, then all reviewers are displayed with basic information including their name, helpful votes, and reviewer ranking.
Given all this information, let’s look at how the Amazon Brushing scam works.
The Trick: Reviews as an Anonymous Receiver
What happens is, when you receive merchandise as a gift, you can leave a review as an anonymous receiver. This way, the sellers buy hundreds of their own products, ship them to others as gifts, then leave a review for themselves (from fake newly-created accounts as buyers) as 5-star. The reviews are as realistic as possible.
When you go on Amazon and look for the desired item, you will look at the reviews and their number. If you see your product has 252 reviews all of a 5-star rating, you’d probably buy on the spot, right?
The merchandise comes with no return addresses, so the recipients don’t know where they are coming from.
Scammers get their money back (as they’re both sellers and buyers), except for a small fee that goes to Amazon. However, the small price they pay comes back 100 times more when they sell their items to gullible buyers online. Hopefully, you’re not one of them.
If you look at the video above, you see that most of the products subject to the Amazon Brushing scheme are smaller, such as humidifiers, flashlights, Bluetooth speakers, phone covers, light bulbs, and smartphones chargers, etc. It could be anything you are looking for.
Amazon Fake Reviews: How To Avoid
It is very hard, indeed. The Amazon headquarters announced that they are looking into the problem. “We investigate every report of customers receiving unsolicited packages and will ban all vendors and reviewers who abuse the review system.”
Until Amazon improves the algorithm and weeds out the fake reviews, you can look for testimonials anywhere else on the Internet besides their platform. Type in Google the name of the product you want to buy and add the word ‘scam’ at the end.
Alternatively, find 3 or 4 more online sources for reviews for the same product. Make sure there are many.
Be also aware of other Amazon-related fraudulent activities such as the fake Amazon Jobs From Home, Amazon Login Attempt Scam, the Amazon Prime Scam, or the Fake Amazon Shipment. Meanwhile, be careful about other promising but bogus work from home scams.
Amazon Brushing Scam Sign Up: How To Report
Warn your friends and family about the Amazon Brushing scam sign up by sharing it on social media here. You can also officially report the scammers or questionable sellers to Amazon using the link below:
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I’m less likely to buy something from Amazon nowadays since most reviews look very suspicious with an unbelievable range of comments and ratings from 1 star to 5 stars, and comments like “…it works great!” to “…it doesn’t work at all”. My reviews tell it like it is, good or bad but, I’m sure my reviews get buried in the plethora of fake reviews. Ebay seems to be better and the Ebay platform has sellers that you can really talk to before buying something from them.
A couple times after leaving a less than stellar review for an item purchased through Amazon, I have received multiple emails from seller asking me to take the review off. They would refund the item amount if I removed the negative review. I wouldn’t. I am very disallusioned with Amazon products now. Can’t believe a thing you see or hear.
Recently, amazon started merging rating of products from different marketplaces. For example, if you sell a fire pit in US, and you sell the same fire pit in UK Japan Canada, etc. Now all the rating of product will be merged in one page.
People just manipulate rating system, for example, on amazon page, you can read rating from UK concerning a book folder, but the page is selling a fire pit in US. Some sellers use this system to get high rating and scam amazon user.
They merge different reviews and rating of other marketplaces(sometimes in Germany or French or English), to make people belive they have really good rating item.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HS5SFB6
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HRYB3BR
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HQJX7BL
Amazon allows fake reviews because they profit from them.
AMAZON TO0K CASH FROM MY ACCOUNT WITHOUT MY KNOWLEDGE–TO HELL WITH AMAZON..
NEVER AGAIN
CROOKS
If Amazon REALLY cared all they would have to do is post the date on the review, about when the receiver became active on Amazon AND if this was their first review. That would pretty much flag it for most people, never mind some fancy math routine.