Reams of positive reviews can push a product high in Amazon's internal search engine and might trigger an Amazon's Choice badge-this endorsement is given to 'highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately,' the company tells shoppers throughout the site. (More on how exactly this happens in a moment.) It can provide even a shoddy product with thousands of 4- and 5-star reviews. It's known in the Amazon seller universe as ' review reuse' or ' review hijacking,' and it happens when unscrupulous sellers find ways to grab positive customer reviews from other products and integrate them into their own listings. This curious game of whack-a-mole is a particularly nettlesome problem for Amazon and its network of sellers. But other examples I found that I didn't alert Amazon about remained on the site.

I sent several of the product listings I found to my contact at Amazon, and within a few days, they, too, were either stripped of the suspicious reviews or deleted altogether. I saw only a handful of reviews for the brace itself-most of them negative.

An Amazon's Choice posture correction brace had 561 reviews when I found it on August 2, with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars, but nearly all of the reviews were for other items, including dish soap, wooden spoons, garbage bags, dish-washing wands, allergy medicine, and a wooden spanking paddle apparently meant for the bedroom. The problem wasn't restricted to electronics accessories. One wireless charger I discovered had reviews for a selfie stick. I found more headphone adapters-one was an Amazon's Choice product with more than 5,800 reviews, including many for an eyelash growth serum, while others included user reviews for colored gel pens and women's boots. In one afternoon I spotted more than a dozen listings that all followed the same general pattern: an item, usually sold by a company I'd never heard of before, with lots of positive reviews for products different from the one listed at the top of the page. Even one inauthentic review is one too many.'īut as I looked around, there were more product listings like this-many more. That same day, an Amazon spokesperson got back to me with a statement that said, in part, 'Amazon invests significant resources to protect the integrity of reviews in our store because we know customers value the insights and experiences shared by fellow shoppers.

Amazon product tester