LONDON: Amazon filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups in a move designed to fight fake reviews on the e-commerce site.
The groups would recruit people who provided fake reviews of Amazon products across its online storefronts in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy.
Reviews were intended to boost product ratings of items ranging from camera tripods to car stereos in exchange for free products or money, Amazon said in a statement.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has made an effort to “shut down multiple major review brokers,” taking down half of the reported groups while investigating the others.
“Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services.
The lawsuit represents a “proactive legal action targeting bad actors,” Mehta said.
Amazon strictly prohibits fake reviews and has a team of more than 12,000 employees around the world dedicated to investigating the problem, as well as protecting its stores from fraud and abuse.
Since 2020, Amazon has reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Meta.
One of the groups identified in the lawsuit is “Amazon Product Review,” which had more than 43,000 members until it was taken down by Meta earlier this year.
Another group, “Amazon Verified Buyer & Seller,” had more than 2,500 members.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, jointly with Amazon were investigated last year by the UK’s antitrust regulator, which questions their efforts to eliminate fake reviews from their platforms.
The investigation comes as part of UK government moves to tackle the problem, with new rules being considered that will make it illegal to write or post fake reviews online.
Rules announced in April will ensure people are not deceived by “bogus ratings.”
