Fake Amazon Reviews. What to do about them? I'm finding more and more of these fake reviews on Amazon, where it appears that the company who makes the product gets several people to post glowing but fake reviews. I've discussed this with several friends, many of whom have also encountered this. This depresses me, as I used to think the best part of Amazon was the reviews. You can read through the most negative reviews (in addition to the most positive) to get a sense of possible negatives of a product which otherwise gets "glowing" reviews. And also perhaps trust the "Real Name" reviews a little bit more than ones posted with just a screen name, but I'm finding even the Real Name reviews are often shills.

I wonder if there are already fake review services popping up on the web. I could even imagine some offshore company offering to post fake Amazon reviews on your product. You could pay $5 for each fake review and $10 for each fake review using a "Real Name".

What solutions might Amazon bring to this?

Possibly the number of orders and money spent by a customer should factor into the "weight" of their reviews.

I did see an amusing attempt by one frustrated review reader -- he created an Amazon "tag" called "fake reviews from company shills" -- HAHAHAHA. However, it has only been used on a few products so far.

Maybe to publish this approach more widely, someone could crate a Firefox plugin called "Amazon Cleaner" which simply created a browser button to tag the current review as a shill? (Of course, this could be used by a company to mark all positive reviews of competitor products as shills. Damn.)

Other ideas?¶6:17 AM