Amazon sues more than 10,000 Facebook groups over fake reviews

July 19 (UPI) -- Amazon filed a lawsuit Tuesday against administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups it accuses of brokering fake reviews.

The fake review groups recruited individuals to post reviews "in exchange for money or free products" on Amazon stores in the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan, such as "car stereos and camera tripods," Amazon alleged in a statement.

Amazon says it seeks trustworthy reviews on individuals' experiences with products from its stores and it has an "anti-manipulation policy" that strictly prohibits fake customer reviews. Amazon noted in its statement that it has more than 12,000 employees worldwide dedicated to investigating such reviews.

In 2020, the e-commerce company proactively stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews, according to the statement.

"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, in the statement. "Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable."

Since 2020, Amazon has reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Facebook's parent company Meta. Out of the 10,000 groups, Meta has taken down more than half of them for policy violations while it continues to investigate others.

A group called "Amazon Product Review," which had more than 43,000 members until Meta took down the group earlier this year is among the groups identified in the lawsuit.

Amazon's investigations found that the group's administrators tried to evade Facebook moderator's detection by removing letters from problematic phrases.

For example, fake review posters often evade Facebook moderator's detection by obfuscating the phrase "Refund after review," instead typing "R**fund Aftr R**vew."

Amazon noted that the current legal action is its latest attempt to protect customers from fake reviews. In May, Mehta wrote in a statement that Amazon took legal actions against three fake review brokers Fivestar Marketing, Matronex, and AppSally, which "have now stopped their fraudulent schemes."