Fake Amazon Reviews

[Steerpike]

I noticed that Amazon now requires the reviewer actually purchasing the product & instituted a 48 hour wait period after purchasing before a review can be posted.

At least shills will have to fork over 30% of the list price to Amazon to post a review I guess.

I think you can review so long as you have an account and have purchased anything at all from Amazon.

[T.Allen.Smith]

Hmmm... Well maybe they should allow reviews only from someone who actually purchased the book.

[Steerpike]

Hmmm... Well maybe they should allow reviews only from someone who actually purchased the book.

Well, the only problem with that is that people give away copies of books to reviewers and bloggers for the specific purpose of reviewing them. Also, there are many books people may have read but not purchased through Amazon. I don't know that there is a good way to limit reviews to people who actually read the book without being overly-restrictive in the other direction.

[T.Allen.Smith]

Just read this....

On Amazon, when customers open a new account, they're required to make a purchase and then wait two days before posting a review. This limits the reviews to the number of credit cards the reviewer holds, and cuts down on fraud. Some sites don't bother to set limits and do minimal monitoring; on those sites, anything goes.

Any truth to that limitation?

[Steerpike]

@T.Allen.Smith - That doesn't make sense to me. Limits the number of reviews to the number of credit cards a person has? I only have one credit card on file with them and have posted more than one review. Some reviewers on that site have posted hundreds of reviews. So as far as I know that is not an actual limitation.

[Christopher Wright]

My personal policy is if I find out an author has been involved in fabricating (or sock puppeting) reviews, I will not read that author. While I consider myself a self-publishing supervillain, I'm not petty. You have to beat the good guys because you're awesome, not because you cheated.

I'm going for Magneto-level villainy here.

Anyway, there are reviews on Amazon where the identity of the reviewer is a confirmed buyer of the work, and reviews where the identity is not. So you're not required to buy the book to review it, but you do have to have an Amazon account.

[Steerpike]

Yes. I just went to Amazon, logged in, and clicked the button to write a review of a work I did not purchase from them. It gave me the web form to write the review, no problem.

[T.Allen.Smith]

My personal policy is if I find out an author has been involved in fabricating (or sock puppeting) reviews, I will not read that author.

That seems like a solid policy.....





@Steerpike - I took the credit card bit to mean that you can't post more than one review per a specific product or book. Since you need to purchase thru a cc to open an account, they could restrict multiple reviews for a single product.

If you had 7 credit cards, you could have 7 accounts & leave 7 fakes reviews for a book, but only one per account for that same book.

Have you tried doing 2 reviews for the same book?

[Steerpike]

@Steerpike - I took the credit card bit to mean that you can't post more than one review per a specific product or book. Since you need to purchase thru a cc to open an account, they could restrict multiple reviews for a single product.

If you had 7 credit cards, you could have 7 accounts & leave 7 fakes reviews for a book, but only one per account for that same book.

I see. Yes, that's a more sensible interpretation

That is probably accurate. I wonder if you need a different email address for each account as well?

[T.Allen.Smith]

I see. Yes, that's a more sensible interpretation

That is probably accurate. I wonder if you need a different email address for each account as well?

More than likely that is the case. Email addresses usually are required to be unique for online vendors to avoid multiple accounts.... That being said, I haven't tried this with Amazon but their required sign-in ID is an email address.