[bitshiffed]

I wish Amazon had a better system for reporting these things, that is, if they cared about the problem enough to implement one. If you contact support they will take your reports of specific items; but will act on those exact things reported only, and not bother to dig any deeper (at least, it appears that way).

This time of year the fake reviews are especially bad as well. For example, if you go to something like the Electronics › Camera & Photo › Video › Camcorders category, every top rated item is padded with, or only contains, fake reviews. They have hundreds of non-verified five star reviews all occurring on a single day. On a few items you can see where there's a whole series of padded reviews, than a few bad, real, reviews from the people that fell for it, than a later series of fake reviews to re-up the score and bury the real ones. Many of the fake reviews are painfully obvious too, like they know they don't even need to try to hide it. You can view a users review history by clicking their name on the review. If you follow most of these fake accounts, all of the activity they have is unverified 5-star reviews for questionable products coming all within a sequence of a few days.

If Amazon is using some internal/automated system to detect these things, it does a fairly horrible job. My guess is its not much of a priority for them though.