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by askar_yu 2313 days ago
I am afraid verified purchases are being gamed too. Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews.

This is not even mentioning incentivized reviwers who may be posting exaggerated (if not fake) reviews for promos, discounts, etc.
2 comments
pyrosome 2313 days ago
> Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews.

This is called brushing and there have been several articles written about it. Scammers create fake accounts for real addresses and then ship fake merchandise to those addresses to get the "verified purchase" for their review.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-brushing-scam-couple-rec...

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j-c-hewitt 2313 days ago
One way in which Amazon has restricted this type of gaming is by restricting the ability of sellers to apply extreme discounting. Even legitimate attempts to do this such as liquidation can result in a warning from Amazon about rank/review manipulation.

However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.

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