For a few weeks it has been very difficult to find fake hard drives on Amazon. This statement is newsworthy because, as La Vanguardia explained in February in the article The review scam: why Amazon’s best-selling hard drive is a scam, devices recommended on the platform with five stars and more than 8,000 opinions were fraudulent products .
These fake hard drives continued to be highly visible in Amazon searches for months, despite the fact that the irregularities were reported both to the company itself and to the Ministry of Consumption, which can investigate these frauds ex officio.
Let’s remember that these fake hard drives consisted of hacked memory cards inside a casing to deceive buyers. Victims of this scam wasted their money thinking they were buying a high-capacity hard drive with an excellent rating, and put their data integrity at risk by using these devices.
On June 15, Amazon Spain published a press release entitled “our proposal to combat false reviews through public-private collaboration.”
It mainly talks about the market for buying and selling fake reviews. “We support increased funding for law enforcement so they can develop better techniques to investigate and take down these intermediaries,” Amazon says in the statement.
Despite the positives of providing more means to investigate fraud, the response to curbing a practice in the public domain was slow: it took months from when we went public with our investigation to when we found that Amazon removed the manipulated reviews. In fact, even today you still see fake hard drives for sale, although their popularity has waned greatly as their vendors’ ratings have not inflated.
It should also be noted that the sale of reviews, which is what this statement put out by Amazon is focused on, was not the reason for our investigation. The system of manipulation of evaluations that we denounce is based on the fact that one product receives the scores of another.
Case in point: The scores that led one of these fake hard drives to be one of Amazon’s best-selling electronics products came from a very different product, a box of crayons.
When La Vanguardia asked Amazon if there has been any kind of operation to eliminate the system that allows this fraud, the company has limited itself to pointing out that “we have very clear policies that prohibit abuse of all kinds, also with reviews. That’s why at Amazon we suspend, ban, and prosecute those who violate these policies and remove inauthentic reviews.”
Amazon has explained to this newspaper that it has not changed its policy regarding reviews. Despite this, it appears that some kind of technological change prevents vendors from manipulating scores.
We have done random searches on Amazon trying to locate the best selling products in different sections. We have not found any manipulation like the ones we detected in its day. This means that it is no longer possible to perform them or that Amazon has stopped sellers who used these fraudulent strategies; Or simply, we have not been able to find them.
This type of scam is very prevalent on other e-commerce sites. On Aliexpress, product ratings are so dubious that they are less and less important. And its users know it, at least the most frequent ones. As we explained in its day, to stop this practice it would be enough for each product to have its own sales card. Or in any case, that only small variations were allowed when editing the information, such as changing the size or color.
