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Monday, May 22, 2017

Scammers elude Amazon crackdown on fake reviews with new tricks

Amazon spent the past couple of years cracking down on fake product reviews, but enterprising tricksters are exploiting a fresh loophole on its site.

Many of the same vendors who sold fake positive reviews on Amazon for $5 a pop are now selling so called “list optimization” or “list maintenance” services, in which they enlist hundreds of people to vote a product review as helpful so that it moves up to the top of a product’s page.

But the votes can also be used to sabotage a competitor, voting up negative reviews of rival products and tanking demand for goods that previously had been well-received, sources told The Post.

“This is an evolution of an existing problem,” said Nii Ahene, co-founder of CPC Strategy, a San Diego-based online consulting firm. “Sellers are negatively influencing their competitors, but at the end of the day it’s a policing problem that Amazon has to address.”

Amazon says its technology can detect this scam.

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