Investigation finds ten websites offering fake Amazon reviews from £5 each; five of the websites claimed to have 702K+ “product reviewers” on their books
Fake reviews for products sold on Amazon's Marketplace are being sold online “in bulk”, according to Which? Source: Which? Press Office .
Context & Ripple Effects
Which?'s finding of ten websites selling fake Amazon Marketplace reviews from £5 each is the latest data point in a seven-year arc that began when Amazon filed its first-ever suit over fake product reviews in 2015 and extended to individuals offering them on Fiverr. The problem has since industrialized: by 2018, paid reviewers were organizing at scale through Reddit, Slack, Discord, and Facebook groups, and by March 2019 Amazon was absorbing over 2 million unverified reviews in a single month, 99.6% of them five stars.
First-order effects
- Third-party Marketplace sellers can now buy review volume as a commodity input at £5 per review, directly undercutting competitors who earn ratings organically.
- Amazon faces renewed public pressure via Which?'s exposure of broker sites claiming 702K+ registered 'product reviewers' — a scale that makes one-off takedowns look inadequate.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's enforcement logic follows the supply chain upstream: having sued individuals in 2015, it later sued the broker platforms themselves, as in the AppSally and Rebatest lawsuits alleging 900K+ combined users posting fake reviews.
- Exposed public broker sites push the trade toward the private channels already documented in 2018 coverage — Discord and Slack groups — raising Amazon's detection costs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, review integrity becomes a structural liability for Marketplace itself: sustained litigation against intermediaries signals that Amazon treats fake reviews as a platform-governance problem, not a seller-conduct problem.
- Persistent paid-review supply risks devaluing the review signal that drives Marketplace purchase decisions, shifting weight toward other trust mechanisms such as verified-purchase badges and brand reputation.
The trend: The fake-review economy is consolidating from freelance individuals into organized broker platforms, dragging Amazon's response from suing reviewers to litigating the marketplaces that recruit them.