Amazon.com Inc. today said that it’s taking legal action to combat fake product reviews posted to its e-commerce platform.

The company is suing the administrators of 10,000 Facebook groups that encourage users to post fake reviews on the Amazon Marketplace. According to the company, the groups focus on its e-commerce storefronts in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan. They recruit users to post fake product reviews in exchange for money or free products.

Amazon has already removed many of the fake reviews commissioned by the Facebook groups whose administrators it’s suing. One such group, which operated until the name “Amazon Product Review,” had more than 43,000 members until Meta removed it earlier this year. Administrators obfuscated letters from problematic phrases in an attempt to avoid detection. 

With its newly filed legal action, Amazon hopes to identify additional bad actors and fake reviews. “Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media,” stated Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services.

Amazon detailed today that it has more than 12,000 employees dedicated to preventing fraud and abuse on its e-commerce platform. Some of those employees are part of a unit that the company created specifically to find fake review schemes on social media. 

According to Amazon, it has reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Facebook operator Meta Platforms Inc. since 2020. Meta has removed more than half of those groups so far and is investigating others. 

Amazon says that its efforts are already helping reduce the number of fake reviews posted to its platform. By the company’s estimates, it has stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews in 2020 alone. More recently, Amazon has over the past year shut down multiple “major review brokers” that targeted its e-commerce storefronts.

“Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable,” Mehta stated. 

Amazon relies on not only human experts but also artificial intelligence to combat e-commerce fraud. Because they require little to no manual input, AI algorithms can quickly review a large amount of potentially suspicious activity. Amazon has also applied its expertise in this area to build Amazon Fraud Detector, an AI-powered fraud detection service available as part of its Amazon Web Services public cloud platform. 

Image: Amazon