Competition bureau investigating fake reviews on Amazon

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OTTAWA – The Competition Bureau is investigating if Amazon is willingly turning a blind eye to fake reviews on its shopping platform as it probes the web giant for potential deceptive marketing practices.

Documents and testimony presented to the Federal Court last week by the competition commissioner’s office and obtained by National Post shed new light on the regulator’s concerns about the potential proliferation of fake reviews on Amazon’s online shop and whether the company is doing enough to fight it.

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The inquiry aims to figure out if Amazon has “a business interest in turning a blind eye to the fake reviews,” Competition Bureau lawyer Derek Leschinsky told the Federal Court last week as part of a request to compel Amazon to turn over a significant trove of information to the regulator.

His colleague, Ryan Caron, told the court that the bureau is concerned Amazon is using a “myopic” approach in combatting fake reviews.

“We want to look at not only what they’re actioning and dealing with but … as well to understand why this conduct seems to be going on for so long” and if Amazon is “wilfully” looking away, he said.

The documents also show how far the Competition Bureau is going in trying to uncover the way that fake-review networks work and how they are contracted on behalf of a client to hire people to write good reviews for some products while swamping competitors’ products with bad reviews, known colloquially as “review bombing.”

In a statement, the Competition Bureau said it is probing if certain claims made by Amazon, such as a product’s global star rating and the “Amazon’s Choice,” “Verified Purchase,” “Best Seller” and “Top Reviewer” badges, are influenced by fake reviews and ratings.

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That would affect how those products are ranked and displayed on the company’s online and mobile platforms. If there are fake positive reviews, a product could be ranked higher in Amazon’s shop, whereas if an item is falsely ranked negatively, it may be unduly buried on the website.

That raises concerns of potential deceptive marketing and misrepresentations to the public, though the bureau insists it has not made any findings of wrongdoing at this time.

In a broad statement that did not address specific questions from National Post, Amazon spokesperson Kristin Gable said the company has a “longstanding commitment” to combatting fake reviews and is collaborating with the bureau.

“Amazon has invested significant resources to proactively stop incentivized reviews using machine-learning models, expert investigators, and legal action, among other tools,” she wrote, adding that fake reviews are a “global issue affecting different industries.”

Earlier this week, Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton issued an order compelling Amazon to hand over a trove of documents to the bureau to advance its inquiry, though he also denied the regulator other data because it was “unreasonable” in scope.

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During a Federal Court hearing last Friday, Caron said the regulator thinks Amazon has taken steps to “partially address” the existence of fake reviews on its platform, including lawsuits against suspected organizers of fraudulent review networks.

“But we also see … indications as to under-enforcement and under-reporting,” Caron said. “The myopic, potentially, approach that they’re using … may lead to under-reporting and under-action such that they are permitting misleading statements to be made to the public.”

He also noted that Amazon formally prohibited paid, or “incentivized,” reviews in 2016. That pushed such behaviour “underground,” senior bureau competition law officer Danielle McKenzie added.

To better understand how paid reviewers act on Amazon, the bureau obtained information about specific users it believed were part of fake review networks that organized on Meta’s platforms.

The bureau then interviewed some of those individuals, who explained how they were recruited to make fake reviews and how they were compensated for their work.

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McKenzie also said she was shown specific false reviews those individuals made and noted some were marked as “helpful votes,” or from a “top reviewer,” or were on products featuring an Amazon’s Choice, Verified Purchase or Best Seller badge.

Part of the information the bureau requested the Federal Court order Amazon to fork over is extensive data about 124 Amazon “top reviewers,” which it identifies by username, a URL to their user page and “reviewer ID” number.

The bureau would not provide a copy of Crampton’s order detailing which information he was compelling Amazon to provide. The Federal Court registry did not respond to requests for the decision by deadline.

In an interview, competition law expert Vass Bednar said she appreciated the bureau’s inquiry into fake reviews on Amazon, but noted it was “unfortunate” that it’s taken so long to get started.

“It does appear there’s a lag, but I think the lag is bureaucratic and about their empowerment more than anything else,” said the executive director of McMaster’s MPP in Digital Society Program.

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She said fake reviews are not a new problem, but are a growing headache for platforms like Amazon due to the power reviewers have over consumers’ choices.

“Because we need that information so badly, it’s popular to pay people to sabotage your competitor or inflate the reviews on your item. Not only does it increase the likelihood of a purchase, but it affects how you show up in search,” Bednar said.

Court records show Amazon also pushed back on the bureau’s initial requests for information leading up to the court hearing.

In a letter dated May 17, Amazon’s lawyers wrote to the bureau saying they were seeking a “massive volume of irrelevant information” and calling on the competition commissioner to further circumscribe its request.

It said parts of the commissioner’s request were “overbroad, excessive and unnecessarily burdensome,” “unrelated” to the inquiry or did not give the company enough time to comply. It also complained the bureau was requesting information for over one billion products.

The commissioner responded by restricting its request partially but disagreed with some of Amazon’s assertions, meaning they had to turn to the Federal Court to rule.

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During the court hearing Friday, Caron said the bureau required so much information because it didn’t want Amazon to choose which data it got to analyze.

“We’re very interested in understanding the product reviews in general and what is said about them, rather than some narrower term that Amazon might define,” he told the court.

“For example, if they have a specific definition that defines ‘incentivized reviews’ in a particular way, and they produce according to that definition, we may only get what they turn an open eye to, which would fall short of concerns about willful blindness,” he added.

“We don’t want to be beholden to (Amazon’s) own categorization of a problem that it’s aware of, so that we can see both what it is acting on and what it may not be acting on.”

Ultimately, Crampton granted the commissioner part of his request but declined to order the production of information about what Amazon described as over a billion products for sale on its platforms.

“In my mind, you don’t need this information on billions of products. I mean, that’s just, on the face of it, unreasonable,” he replied to arguments from the commissioner’s office.

National Post

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