Fake Review Scheme?

[nepats197 0]

I was looking at dehumidifiers and something about the reviews just seems off to me.  Running a reviewmeta test on it comes back clean and to most would seem like legitimate reviews but can't help questioning it; maybe it's just me...

https://www.amazon.com/Waykar-Dehumidifier-Basements-Moisture-Continuous/product-reviews/B07VWHR7LQ/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews

- All of the top reviews have 5 stars

- At least 30-40 people found just these reviews helpful.  More recent reviews, only 1-2 people found them useful.

- They're all posted within a month or two of each other.

- The top most reviews are also the oldest reviews

- The reviews read like a commercial or seem to have gone through a google translate.

- Looking at some of the other reviews these people have done also seems to be strange such as this one; untypical purchasing imo.  

Almost seems like Vine type reviews but to build an initial reputation for the product. Again I could just be reading into this too much but seemed a little weird to me.  

[ReviewMeta 35]

I agree, this definitely looks fishy.  Immediately when you flip to the second page of reviews, the helpfulness count drops from 30+ to 1-2.  It appears that someone was trying to get these reviews to the first page.  This probably isn't the only seller engaging in something like this.

What's interesting is that I often get spam emails that look like this: 

Hello Amazon Seller,
If you’re worried about your 1 or 2 star Negative Reviews those are highly damaging your daily sales by making customer Confusion when it’s showing over the front page of your all Customer Reviews list.
In that case,
We’re helping Amazon sellers to scale up their sales by Up-Vote (Helpful) your Positive Reviews or Push Down all of your Negative Product Reviews to attract more shopper and then boost your sales instantly.

Why us:
1# Always Pay after seeing results, no advanced or Upfront money needed to begin with us.
2# Doing Votes by real even Regular purchase background customer profile, NO BOT or anything like that.
3# 100% Guaranteed for Seller Safety, Privacy & Faster Results.
4# Available for any Country or Any Amount of Votes.
I would really love to appreciate your comments or queries.
Feel free to Contact

$kype: rollonvotesservice
Email: [email protected]

So I'm assuming they're flying under the RM radar because they only had a few carefully placed reviews, and then leveraged any 5-star reviews with the helpful votes pushing them to the top.  

This is one of the reasons I often recommend that people sort reviews by "recent" and read some of those.  It's hard for a seller to constantly be stuffing fresh reviews in, so often times, the most recent reviews will help show a more current picture of the product.

[ReviewMeta 35]

Wow, and just today I got this spam email, literally 5 times:

 

Hello Merchant,
I’ve made an Analytics on your Amazon Product Reviews that are Converting your shoppers till SALES. So, we’d love to help you with each of your Amazon Product for their Customer Reviews that will increase your sales better than before.

What is this?
It’s called, “Amazon VOTES” Means - “Helpful” or “Report Abuse” thumbs for your Product Reviews. In this way, we can easily push down your Negative/Critical Reviews from the top reviews page or product home page and keep up only the best Positive reviews under top page to attract more shoppers and maximum conversion of SALES!

ADVANTAGE OF VOTES?
1. Bring the best Customer Reviews of your Choice to page#1. Let your Buyers only see the Good or Best Reviews of your Product.
2. So, You get to manage featured 5 Star reviews on the 1st page.
3. Improve conversion by turning potential buyers into customers.
4. Improve SEARCH Results of your Product Keywords in Amazon.
5. Beat your Competitor’s attacks to your listing by VOTES!

“It’s almost a rearranging of your customer reviews list as you’re expecting as a best seller”

Please have a look in details: https://www.getamazonreviews.com/amz-votes-for-reviews

We're a big team and agency here to take care of your amazon product reviews by Votes and many more.

Regards,
Rashedur Jaman
CEO,
GetAmazonReviews.com
Email+Skype: [email protected]
+17249244185

[nepats197 0]

Disgusting.  I'd like to be able to rely on reviews before purchasing a product, especially off brand, and we clearly can't anymore.  It's really too bad Amazon doesn't have any protocols/ analytics in place to alert and prevent such weird behavior; but I guess upon casual observation they could appear relatively legitimate without connecting the dots. Amazon really is turning into a chinese wish.com dumping ground.   Do you think reviewmeta could maybe flag the above (your email) as questionable reviews; meaning those with abnormal 'helpful' review counts and then for the rest returning to 1-2 helpfuls. Not really sure what else could be done or how these could be flagged.

[ReviewMeta 35]

We did have a skewed helpfulness test (https://reviewmeta.com/blog/skewed-helpfulness/) however had to discontinue it because Amazon stopped displaying the number of helpful and unhelpful votes.  Now they only show the total net helpfulness, which isn't as helpful to us.