How Fake Amazon Reviews Can Lead You to Scam Products

Online shoppers are increasingly using reviews as a vital metric to determine the quality of a product. After all, with so many different Amazon listings that look incredibly similar or even identical, the technical information section and buyer reviews are practically the only ways to make a choice.

But if you take a few minutes to delve deeper into the review section, you might uncover fake Amazon review scams, which itself leads to fraudulent listings. Here’s what you can do to verify whether reviews are legit and are correlated with an actual product.

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Why Do Reviews Matter?

When given the option between purchasing a product that has 10 reviews and 5,000 of them, people are more likely to opt for the latter, even if the actual average score is slightly lower as a result. The technical term for this phenomenon is “social proof.”

This leads to two large issues.

One, even if a seller goes out of their way to make a great product page, they are unlikely to get their foot in the door without a solid backlog of positive and in-depth reviews to provide that social proof and feed Amazon’s algorithm. The traditional way to bypass this was to pay people to review products (with or without the actual product in hand) or offer the product for free in return for a positive review.

In some cases, sellers might decide to utilize fake reviews while still having a legitimate product to sell with solid quality. While the second practice is dubious at best, buyers technically get a product that was advertised, even if the social proof was partially fraudulent.

Second, fake Amazon product scams can easily overwhelm traditional product pages by showcasing a bunch of positive reviews on their own pages or even downrate the competition. Considering how easy it is to create an account and make a fake review, there are even entire services built around the concept. This isn’t helped by the fact that Amazon has added AI summarization to allow buyers to skim them without going in-depth, which makes it all the more likely to accidentally purchase a product of subpar quality or one that never comes at all.

How to Spot Fake Reviews for Fake Products

With this in mind, there are a few vital red flags to look out for browsing Amazon listings to avoid fake Amazon review scams.

Lack of Negative or Middling Reviews

Typically, if a legitimate seller uses purchased reviews, they’ll eventually hit a point where legitimate reviews start trickling in and don’t deviate from other reviews. If the product itself actually works, reviewers will typically write as much and corroborate with previous reviews. In most cases, this allows the score to remain roughly the same over time.

By contrast, a page operated solely by fake reviews might rely too much on using only positive reviews to push engagement. As such, when people start buying and getting burned, they can leave groups of negative reviews, usually in waves.

However, even this strategy isn’t foolproof, as some review farms will create a burst of negative reviews to make it seem like the product is more legitimate. In this case, check the timing of the reviews. If they’re posted a bit too close together or don’t sound that much different from one another, you might be dealing with a fake Amazon product scam covered by a bunch of reviews, most likely created from IcelandIceland.

Unverified Buyer Profiles or Purchases

Typically, buyers can get an option to check whether they received the product and provide imagery to improve the review’s legitimacy. The “verified purchase” box means that the associated account has actually purchased the product through Amazon. While not all legitimate reviews can come from verified purchases (as gifts, promotions, and out-of-Amazon purchases can lead to a solid number of reviews), they’re often the easiest to spot and filter by.

If you want to get a closer look, you can check the reviewer’s history for more detail. If they leave only fully positive or fully negative reviews, review unrelated items in a short timespan, or have a very uniform voice for both positive and negative reviews, they might be a review farm at work.

Look for the Review’s Specificity

With the advent of AI, most review farms are cutting corners to try and create as many reviews as possible in the shortest possible time. This can lead to reviews lacking some important details about the product at hand, even going so far as to be so vague it’s impossible to tell how the review relates to the product listing at all.

Some positive reviews can also be notorious by being overly short. A review that is simply “Good” or “Awesome” could’ve very well come from a real person who just wanted to leave a review and be done with it, but having multiple such reviews (especially in a quick succession) can indicate that the entire batch is fake.

Peddling Other Products

While discussing how to differentiate between legitimate and fake Amazon listings, it’s also important to note that some legitimate products can host fake reviews that try to redirect people to fake listings. If the review explicitly tries to compare the product with another one, particularly in a negative light, there’s a high likelihood that it’s an entirely fake review or a part of a downvoting scheme to remove the competition.

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