Sruthi asks a question “— why does it seem like Amazon has suddenly gotten a lot sketchier?“ Alex investigates.
Further Reading:

Elizabeth Dwoskin on Amazon
Buzzfeed’s Nicole Nguyen on Amazon Fake Reviewers


Full comment from Amazon Spokesperson:

We know that millions of customers make informed buying decisions everyday using Customer Reviews. We take this responsibility very seriously and defend the integrity of reviews by taking aggressive action to protect customers from dishonest parties who are abusing the reviews system. Inauthentic reviews made up less than 1% of all reviews on Amazon last month but even one is unacceptable. Customers can report suspicious reviews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and we investigate each claim. We take forceful action against both reviewers and sellers by suppressing reviews that violate our guidelines and suspend, ban or pursue legal action against these bad actors.

In order to detect potentially inauthentic Customer Reviews, we make significant investments in machine learning and automated systems. Machine learning allows us to scale quickly and respond to abuse faster. We leverage models at the reviewer level, Customer Review level, product level and the seller level. We have banned hundreds of thousands of customers for creating inauthentic reviews and we are using this data to predict future techniques. As we shut down bad actors and the current root causes of abuse, our systems continue to evolve and innovate on the next challenge. In addition to advance detection, we’ve filed lawsuits against more than 1000 defendants for reviews abuse and will continue to suspend, ban and pursue legal action against the sellers and manufacturers who create the demand for inauthentic reviews as well as the number of individuals and organizations who supply fraudulent reviews in exchange for compensation.

In addition, we give more weight to newer, more helpful reviews, apply strict criteria to qualify for the Amazon verified purchase badge and enforce a significant dollar amount requirement to participate in our community. Customer reviews are one of the most valuable tools we offer for making informed purchase decisions and we work hard to make sure they are doing their job.