Beware before your buy; Data breach exposes Amazon fake reviews scam

Reporter: Rich Kolko
Published: Updated:
Fake reviews are prevalent on Amazon, Walmart and other major retailers. (CBS News photo)
Fake reviews are prevalent on Amazon, Walmart and other major retailers. (CBS News photo)

Oftentimes you go online and the product you are looking at has nothing but five stars, but those reviews may not be true.

Some companies are actually paying people to leave them a positive review and game the system.

How exactly does this work?

Through the pandemic, people have been shopping online. And a recent data breach uncovered a fake review scam between Amazon vendors and customers.

Amazon ships more than 1.6 million packages every day! And those buyers often rely on reviews.

It turns out that some vendors are getting people to write fake five-star reviews.

They send people a list of products to buy, and if they buy it and write a good review, they get their money back and get to keep the product, for free.

Retired FBI Agent Jim Derrane, now with Eagle Security Group, says it’s a scam but it’s not necessarily illegal.

“This scam goes back to the old snake oil salesman from 100 years ago, pre-technology, this is just a high tech version of that,” Derrane said. “These people want to sell products, they want to make money and they will use different techniques in order to do that.”

A couple of things you can do to spot fake reviews.

  • Many reviews are posted on the same day
  • Very few negative reviews
  • Overly positive and with marketing-type wording
  • Beware if they’re poorly written

Do a reverse image search on the poster’s photo to see if you can find it elsewhere. Also, look for the same name posting lots of reviews.

They may have found a way to make some money on this.

And you may want to overlook the very best and the very worst interviews on any product.

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