Amazon is getting some help in its fight against fake reviews.
The Seattle tech giant and the Better Business Bureau filed a lawsuit Thursday morning against a business called ReviewServiceUSA.com that allegedly facilitated the sale of fake, positive reviews on Amazon product listings and Better Business Bureau profile pages.
“In exchange for a fee, Defendants or their agents used customer accounts that they control to post fake product reviews on the product listing pages of bad actors operating Amazon selling accounts,” alleges the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
Operating under the name “Buy Amazon Reviews,” the company attempted “to create the false appearance of authentic purchases and reviews in Amazon’s systems in an attempt to evade enforcement and removal of the reviews by Amazon,” the suit alleges.
It’s the first joint lawsuit for Amazon in its long-running battle to weed out fraudulent online reviews from its e-commerce platform. The company filed its first lawsuit over fake reviews in 2015. Amazon said it blocked more than 250 million suspected fake reviews in 2023.
Amazon is involved in multiple ongoing lawsuits against so-called fake review brokers. The company uses a variety of tools to identify and take down fake reviews, including machine learning models and expert investigators.
Read the full complaint below.
ReviewServiceUSA – Joint Amazon BBB RA Complaint by GeekWire on Scribd