PicoBlog

First, thanks for voting in the Bruce Springsteen poll.

With almost 3,000 votes, The Boss was awarded ‘Phony Baloney’ by a 2-1 margin.

Many thanks also to reader Janet Sullivan who touted Tom Petty as an antidote and recommended the documentary “Running Down The Dream” in the comments.  I watched Part 1 this week and it’s excellent.  Thank you!

Now I’m going to tell you about a place where fakes, shady sellers and scams flourish, and where your hard-earned money is at the mercy of clever, fraudulent schemesters.

That’s the sad state of affairs at Amazon today, our nation’s 2nd largest retailer.

The Wall Street Journal covered ‘How to Spot Fake Reviews and Shady Ratings on Amazon’ recently, and I’ve dug into a whole lot more detail on HackerNews, Twitter, and Insider.

The problem has grown so large, and gotten so bad, that Amazon was forced to put out a face-saving press release about suing these fakers:

“The lawsuits aim to shut down two major fake review brokers, AppSally and Rebatest, who helped mislead shoppers by having their members try to post fake reviews in stores such as Amazon…”

I’m a long-time Amazon Prime customer.  Between ’Subscribe & Save’ for items like paper towels,  and my book reading addiction, I've placed well over 1,000 orders in the past 20+ years, and have funded a tiny sliver of the Bezos Family Yacht Fund.

Somehow it didn’t get me on the Christmas Card list. 🤷🏽

The big problem is Amazon’s changing business model.  Amazon likes hosting millions of stores run by offshore third parties who have no skin in the game, and no morals about screwing you over.

These fly-by-night third-parties make it difficult for normal customers like you and me to have a fraud-free, scam-free experience when shopping on Amazon.  

What’s worse, they account for the majority of sales on the site, clocking 55% of all retail sales on Amazon.com in 2021.

The fact that we consumers waste so much time dealing with their nasty tactics, criminal behavior and Hunter-Biden-like ethics doesn’t seem to bother Amazon. It certainly doesn’t hurt their financial performance or cause the bosses there to lose their bonuses.

But I wish it did because wasting our time, money and safety doesn’t seem like the behavior we should expect from one of America’s most successful corporations.

Cole South, a ‘former washed-up poker pro,’ who has since gone into the e-commerce biz, is one of the good ones. He outlines in terrific detail in this Twitter thread the fast times and slimy crimes of Amazon’s shadowy third-party sellers who are ruining it for honest ones like him.

He includes screenshots of sellers bribing Amazon employees, stealing reviews from old listings, sneaking bad words and bad pictures into competitors’ listings, and engaging in a weird practice called Wishlist botting.

So how should you protect yourself?

Some people suggest using Fakespot, but I found problems with the service.

For example, the Fakespot for my bestselling book - “Ladders’ Resume Guide, Third Edition” - gives our review quality an ‘A’, which makes sense, because we didn’t pay anybody for any review.

So far, so good.

And when I tested the direct-from-China names above, Fakespot gave them ‘D’s and ‘F’s.  So that seemed promising.

But when I checked Amazon’s own brands, such as their Amazon Essentials Men’s Shorts, Fakespot flagged them as mostly false, giving Amazon a ‘D’ for review quality.

Call me naive, but I just don’t think Amazon would risk spoofing their own reviews.

So in the absence of a foolproof lie detector test, here are five ways to protect yourself from bad sellers and made-up reviews on Amazon:

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