During the late afternoon on May 10, Amazon removed the vast majority of product listings for electronics accessory companies like Aukey, MPow and Tomtop. This action comes roughly a month before Prime Day, typically quite profitable for Chinese sellers like Aukey.

It’s likely this is due to a system for fake reviews that these companies implemented in order to inflate their position within Amazon’s sales listings. More than 13 million of these types of reviews were uncovered by the folks at SafetyDetective.

To begin, the seller would send a list of products out that they want 5-star reviews on. People participating in the scam would buy the product, leave a five star review, submit the proof of the review to the seller and receive money back for the cost of the product via sites like PayPal. The person writing the fake review would get to keep the product for free.

The massive 7GB of data includes information like email addresses and phone numbers for the sellers as well as personal data for more than 75,000 Amazon “reviewers” who are getting paid for their services. This means Amazon can remove sellers as well as use identifying information to ban the fake reviewers from the system and delete all reviews.

Amazon released a statement about the removal of these brands:

We work hard to build a great experience for our customers and sellers and take action to protect them from those that threaten their experience in our store. We have systems and processes to detect suspicious behavior and we have teams that investigate and take action quickly.

We have long-standing policies to protect the integrity of our store, including product authenticity, genuine reviews, and products meeting the expectations of our customers. We take swift action against those that violate them, including suspending or removing selling privileges. We take this responsibility seriously, monitor our decision accuracy and maintain a high bar.

You can avoid products on Amazon with fake reviews by looking for specific signs. For instance:

• Check the reviewer’s account on Amazon. If they consistently leave a specific type of review, say 5-stars on a specific brand, that’s a fake reviewer. The same advice goes for repeated negative reviews.
• Sort reviews by date and look to see if a large batch arrived within days of each other. It’s highly unlikely that tons of people all decided to submit a review at the same time.
• Check the length of the reviews. If there’s a large volume of high-star, 2 sentence reviews, it’s probably a batch of fake, paid reviews.
• Look for unspecific language. Many of these fake reviews come off as advertisements rather than an actual judgement of the product’s viability.
• Be wary of unknown brands. If you haven’t heard of it and it’s appearing in Amazon’s top search listings, it’s possible the reviews have been inflated to push it up the charts.
• Use the report button. If you think you have spotted a fake review on Amazon, use the report button and refer the review for review by Amazon’s internal teams.

Amazon bans Aukey, Mpow from site for fake, paid reviews

While Amazon recently made a big show of going after reviewers selling their review services on sites like Fiverr and other employee crowdsourcing sites, Amazon hasn’t made any substantial moves against the rampant growth of overseas sellers flooding the retail site with fake reviews.

This is usually how it works. A reseller will source products from a country that manufacturers items very cheaply, like China for instance. They list those products on Amazon, then distribute a sample of those products to a group of “unbiased” reviewers at a steep discount or completely free.

Those “unbiased” reviewers plaster Amazon with 5-star reviews for the product with a variation on this disclaimer phrase “I received this item at a discounted price for my honest and unbiased review.“These “unbiased” reviews will usually include a smattering of product pictures as well as common phrases that pop up in the description. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to identify these shills.

Three tips to identifying fake reviews:

• Search Amazon reviews for specific keywords like “discount,” “honest,” “unbiased,” or “review.” If you see a rash of reviews with that common disclaimer phrase pop up, you have discovered fake reviews.
• Use the sorting function to look at the timing of the reviews. When most of the 5-star reviews are around the same time period (perhaps within seven to ten days), those are likely fake reviews.
• Fake reviews are typically short, include extremely general details and have an overbearing level of positive superlatives. It’s also likely you will see grammatical errors in phrasing.

Alternatively, you can also use FakeSpot

Fakespot.com is a new site that popped up within the last few months that uses algorithms to analyze all reviews for a specific product. The site searches for automated reviews (generated by bots), one person writing reviews under several fake profiles, and reviews that were written in exchange for discounted or free products.

You can use the FakeSpot site in order to specifically analyze an Amazon URL or you can download the Google Chrome extension to automatically check an Amazon page

Let’s look at a few examples of super fake reviews:

G-Cord Bluetooth Headset: 93% Fake Reviews

The biggest problem with these G-Cord reviews is short length and poor writing. There are few specifics about the product within the reviews and many appear to have been purchased around later October.

Youna Women’s Leather Handbag: 77% Fake Reviews

These reviews are obviously fake due to common phrases used between different reviews as well as constant mentions of receiving the product at a discount. There’s an identical trend in other Youna reviews.

Seneo Wireless Security Camera: 79% Fake Reviews

The three core problems with this batch include an overwhelming amount of positive reviews, language that utilizes too many positive superlatives, and reviews that exist without the reviewer actually purchasing the product.

On the flip side, let’s look at a legitimate review page.

AUKEY Desktop Charging Station: Only 3.5% Fake Reviews

With such a small amount of fake reviews in the mix, you can easily trust the Amazon reviewers for this particular product.

Why Hasn’t Amazon Removed These Obviously Fake Reviews?

Surely, a retailer with a market value of $250 billion could afford to invest in a little algorithmic learning that spots and removes fake reviews. One issue is that exchanging product for reviews is basically the definition of the Amazon Vine reviewer program. Products are distributed to Amazon Vine reviewers for free in exchange for a detailed review. Amazon is leading by example, to a certain extent.

Another issue is that Amazon makes loads of money facilitating the sale of products through third party sellers. Amazon takes a commission percentage for each product that a third party sells on the site. In addition, third party sales have greater margins, thus many analysts believe Amazon is making more on these sales than selling first party items. Of course, Amazon also makes money on fees when storing items for a third party seller in an Amazon warehouse.

No matter which way you slice it, there’s an obvious conflict of interest for Amazon to move faster on removing obviously fake reviews. Fake, 5-star reviews help products sell more quickly, even if it’s at the expense of the Amazon customer.

How to Spot the Fake Amazon Reviews that Amazon won’t remove