It was falling behind. The dodgy stores were getting more creative and Fakespot needed to play catch up.
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review.
You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE.
Then an expensive option I was suprised happened - I bought a Dyson clone vacuum cleaner off of Amazon. A few weeks later, the company emailed me and said 'We have a new model. Buy that one, leave a review, we'll refund the purchase'. So I did it. This happened about 10 more times in 2024. My outdoor shed is entirely stick vacuums.
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
I think Fakespot would have difficulty with all 3 of these scenarios.
Some company paid be 100 bucks to change my review to be positive so they sent the money via PayPal no problem then I changed the review to say they paid me to write a glowing review and of course Amazon ended up removing the review for being harmful to their customers
Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews.
Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
you're supposed to report this to amazon customer service not via a review. just send em a photo of the bribe and they'll verify it. yes it's not as satisfying but they can't validate your review unless you also posted a photo.
Yeah, I'm generally aware of that - but I needed them fast, and decided it was worth taking a gamble. (I did at least get a return/refund, so there's that.)
Amazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good quality and what's not.
I kinda dropped using Amazon, both on principle, but also because they can't compete anymore.
Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.
The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical.
One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.
Much more, Amazon also loves to remove all reviews that mention that the product is counterfeit. Several times I did receive clear counterfeit goods via Amazon, but there is no way to warn others as these reviews are blocked.
I do Amazon Vine reviews and we learn quickly all the things we can't say. For health products you can hardly say anything due to the legalities of appearing to make health claims. People also get their reviews removed regularly for claiming something is inauthentic. I kind of get why, because a person probably doesn't have the equipment to really determine that, and Amazon has separate channels for reporting such things. Basically reviews are just for relating your experience of a product. There are ways of communicating lack of authenticity by being more humble, as in noting that it doesn't seem like leather, or when burned it melts like plastic. I've reviewed many e.g. fake memory cards, and had no problem noting that it has less capacity than claimed, and showing some test programs' results that confirm.
Part of the issue is that they commingle inventory their warehouses receive from third-party sellers based on ISBN. So if you receive a counterfeit, it might be the fault of the seller you bought it from, or it might be Amazon's fault for mixing in counterfeit goods from some other third-party seller without doing proper quality control. Unsurprisingly they don't want reviews that draw attention to this longstanding problem.
That must explain why I’ve seen bad reviews that have 5 stars. I guess the review itself really does not matter as much as long as the stupid starts are there.
It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex management companies, Graystar using a similar method by bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5 star review on Google maps.
They can but they won’t. My original review was still there (as in was included in my updated review) saying how it was fundamentally flawed and will break. Was some video tripod with this dumb mechanism that would work itself loose by just panning. Never seen anything like it.
Plus side looks like the product doesn’t exist on Amazon so guess there’s a victory there somewhere.
I can understand going for the "free upgrade" the first time around, but why continue racking up more vacuum cleaners after that? Do you plan to sell them later?
You sound like my wife. I don't know. I grew up kind of poor and my mindset still has a "If I can get an item typically worth $100-200 for free, TAKE IT".
The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just hoarded them.
this example suggests that you'd be happy to get paid in an alternative currency in exchange for Amazon reviews, and that currency is vacuums?! tbh I think your wife is right and you know it.
All moral implications are minimal if your morals are flexible enough.
The OP is effectively taking thousands of dollars in bribes to erode public trust. I think even a child would see that this is wrong.
I know every man has their price, but I hope when the time comes my price will be higher than "a bunch of vacuums I don't need and I can't even be bothered to sell".
Sure, but consider the costs of consuming your space with junk. Now you have less room for things you care about, there's a maintenance burden, and there's a mental burden as well
Yes, but were the vacuums actually good? He left 10 reviews for this company, which may have led other people to buy them, and made this company look better than it is... just so he could stuff his shed full of them? That's kinda fucked up. He even said he felt kinda shady about it, so my guess is that the reviews weren't honest.
When you have extremely generous return policies then reviews matter less. They are still relevant if your'e trying to optimize for buy once for life, but in that case you should just be going for established brands instead, where their reputation is their review.
I had to leave a video review component (No face). I wonder if any shoppers ever wondered why the same monotone man was constantly buying and reviewing vaccuum cleaners if he's always leaving positive reviews?!
> Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable business model for Fakespot despite its popularity
I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever.
I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their strategy to monetize me? User data? Commissions? Some kind of Mozilla+ subscription?
I love FF and cheer Mozilla on where I can, but honestly these decisions are inscrutable.
Right, why even buy it in the first place? I can't imagine the landscape has changed much, unless the most popular comment here is all the evidence you need...
Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.
I think this is the real answer; they've got a vague mission statement, they saw something they wanted to support, opted to buy it, and in classic Mozilla fashion let it squander because the managers in charge moved on.
It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.
Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.
I do get the feeling that Mozilla has no idea what their goal is any more. Another one they are like is Yahoo! Just seem to be endlessly trying new things but not really committing to any of the new things one they have them.
I’d guess the idea was about generalizing the team’s efforts to spot fakery across the internet, in-browser. But that horse has left the barn.
Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.
I recall seeing the Mozilla Review Checker pop up on Amazon shortly after I started using it as my daily driver.
I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.
I did search around looking for alternatives and the landscape isn't great. There's ReviewMeta.com which doesn't work 100% of the time and is no longer actively maintained as far as I can tell.
TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.
SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for
Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs
If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!
I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.
I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.
Please help me understand why a subscription to your service should be a valuable addition to my monthly spend.
I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.
I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.
I saw that actually. I mentioned in another post on here recently that I figured that the only way a Fakespot v2 could exist is with a subscription model, but on the other hand, it's probably not something I could afford. Good luck with it though! You could always try advertising & affiliate links as a test to monetize the service as well.
Thanks! Advertising is certainly a possibility, though I'm not sure using affiliate links in the browser extension itself will be an option. I know Google recently changed their policy on how browser extensions can manipulate affiliate links after the Honey scandal: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24328268/honey-coupon-co...
Yeah, probably not in the extension itself. But, Fakespot, on their web based reviews, had listings to alternative or better rated products than the one you were searching for. Possibly a bit of a conflict, but as far as I'm aware, it's the only way Fakespot was monetized.
I sell books on Amazon.com through their KDP Direct platform, and I have one book with two different covers; each is its own "book" in their catalog. FakeSpot repeatedly marked reviews I knew were valid as fake; I knew this based on the fact that the same reviewer reviewed the "other" book and that review was NOT flagged as fake. And this happened multiple times, and sometimes the wording of the two reviews were different. Further investigation showed FakeSpot had rather a poor reputation overall due to too many false positives. Good riddance, as far as I'm concerned.
For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.
Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.
My own form of Amazon punishment for allowing fake reviews is to send back their falsely reviewed crap on their own dime. If they want to save $$ they should clean up the review process.
“Musk is that which smells by itself, not what the perfumer says (about it).”
This line is from Saadi Shirazi, the classical Persian poet which has become a proverb in Persian speaking world. Reviews are at this point what the seller wants you to read.
As long as Amazon is the seller, and host of the reviews there is no way to trust Amazon would be fair in hosting those reviews.
The only way to know about a product is to read about it elsewhere like New York Times which is not selling the product themselves.
With removal of reviews that the seller doesn't like, there's really no point to taking Amazon's star ratings or reviews seriously. It's all a big lie.
I’ve started resorting to the “x bought this month” metric instead. If a product works for thousands of people and they continue to buy 500+ units a month, clearly it is a good option.
If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30 day return policy for most items. Use that and get something else.
Except with clothes and especially belts, I've noticed. It seems like everybody buys three of the clothes they buy and returns two of them. It makes it harder to identify shitty clothes.
How do you know that 500 people didn't buy a scam product this month? I put as much faith in the X people bought this as I do the X people have this in their cart. It's all a way of trying to stoke FOMO
what makes you believe that the number you see in “x bought this month” is not some variant of
if (session_is_gullible_to_displayed_sales_number) {
return HIGH_SALESNUMBER;
}
?
There’s also the strangely still-not-even-admitted-as-problematic Amazon item page referent shuffle, where one item is for sale on a given page, and the item sold by that page points to one item by a given seller. The reviews of this item are spammed positively, and then the item being sold on that page is changed by the seller, yet the reviews follow the page, not the item sold at the time the review was placed.
This combined with Amazon’s commingling of inventory of Amazon corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling counterfeit products. You never know what you’re going to get with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party sellers. It’s insane.
Counterfeit items are contraband and may not be legal to be shipped or mailed, as they are evidence that a crime may have occurred. To return counterfeit items for material benefit to the seller or agent in order to receive a refund is possibly helping the fraud to continue by allowing the destruction of property/evidence. I advise all folks who suspect counterfeit goods to report them to the FTC and their local police department to get a police report, and insist that the police take the item(s) as evidence, then provide the police report to Amazon to facilitate the refund, instead of returning the potential contraband to the contraband dealer for them to sell again or for them to destroy the insufficiently misleading fake item.
Scammers are somehow using Amazon itself as an A/B test for if your fakes pass muster, from what I can tell, and everyone loses but Amazon and the bad guys. How long must this continue?
I haven’t done this myself, but I have discovered that it is not allowed to ship or mail items with lithium ion batteries that are likely or suspected to be or actually are damaged, which came in handy when I discovered that a previously working device suddenly stopped charging within the return period. Amazon said I had to work with the seller directly through Amazon, which I did, and when they offered to replace the item and I desired a refund, they refused and stopped responding. I elevated the issue to Amazon and they asked me to return the item, which I was unable to in good conscience do, as I could not attest to the shipper that it was safe to mail, as it had a non-removable battery that would now no longer charge. So Amazon said please don’t ship it, but to dispose of it according to my local disposal regulations.
In the interest of public safety, I told a lot of people about this important issue at my own freebooted unaffiliated DEF CON 30 talk outside while a bomb threat or something caused Caesar’s to be on lockdown. At this talk, I gave away the affected device, a Ledger Nano X which would work when powered via USB C but would not charge or work unplugged. All features and functions still worked otherwise.
> You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha
It’s funny you mention that, as I really had to almost haggle to give it away, it was really a kind of comedy routine that occurred to me in the moment, and it was hilarious. Think about the tone of delivery of spam emails. The delivery mechanism itself is worded in such a way that it weeds out folks not receptive to the message. The message is the medium. It’s the multi sensory experience of being appealed to which is the payload that runs on vulnerable processors of susceptible minds, if you ingest it in the way presented and intended.
Thank you for coming to my socially engineered TED Talk re-enactment. I had a lot of fun that year and will be going to DEF CON again this year in a month or so too!
Some online retailers (such as galaxus for those in Europe) include return statistics on the sale page against comparison brands as well as price history graphs. This helps stamp out two of the core complaints about amazon: fake reviews and fraudulent discounts.
If you look around, you'll see products on Amazon occasionally marked as "frequently returned". It has steered me away from a few purchases.
Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.
There's a discoverability problem with this tool because I've never heard of Fakespot or Mozilla Review Checker until today.
> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
Reading reviews for the thing you are buying on the platform that you are buying it sounds a bit sketchy anyway.
Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable. Also can combine this with marketplace reviews considering reliability.
If there is no review than have to trust the brand and if there is no brand then it is a gamble
Did Fakespot work? I can't see how it would stand a chance against LLM generated reviews without even having the log (keystroke?) data that Amazon does.
Better than nothing. Not sure how well it worked or if it used any particularly advanced AI similarity checker or sentiment analysis.
It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.
One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.
The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.
Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.
I found that it did a pretty decent job. Certainly not 100% accurate, but it often picked up on signals that made me give a closer look at a listing than I would have otherwise.
I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
I think by now I have quickly learnt that they can just read all the worst reviews and see if they can: 1. put up with the drawbacks, 2. see how frequent manufacturing defects are. 5* reviews are only useful if they upload real images.