Amazon Files Suit Against Individuals Offering Fake Product Reviews On Fiverr.com
Context & Ripple Effects
This lawsuit is the second fake-review action Amazon has filed in 2015, following its first-ever suit over fraudulent praise sold by a California man six months earlier — but the target has shifted from a single seller of fake reviews to individual freelancers advertising them on Fiverr, a mainstream gig marketplace.
The move matters because Amazon's product-ranking engine runs on review volume and ratings, so purchased praise directly distorts what shoppers see; the coverage trail shows the company treating review integrity as a legal enforcement problem rather than just a moderation one.
First-order effects
- Individuals listing fake-review gigs on Fiverr now face named litigation rather than account takedowns, raising the personal cost of brokering bogus Amazon feedback.
Second-order effects
- Review brokers respond the way later coverage documents: organizing into private channels like Reddit, Slack, Discord, and Facebook groups where they are harder to enumerate and sue, as BuzzFeed's reporting on reviewers still flooding the site makes clear.
Third-order effects
- The escalation path visible across the corpus — individuals in 2015, then review-farm sites AppSally and Rebatest with 900K+ users, then admins of 10K+ Facebook review-for-cash groups — points toward enforcement aimed at the broker networks themselves, since suing end reviewers never dries up supply.
The trend: Amazon's fight against fake reviews is shifting from punishing individual reviewers to dismantling the organized marketplaces and communities that sell them.