Amazon Reviews: Continuing Degrading and Loss of Credibility and Value.

Amazon reviews are intended to provide honest feedback of user's experiences with Amazon products. Many readers take these reviews at their face value. Unfortunately, seller have learned how to finesse Amazon's lax rules and review policies have been exploited by numerous seller, particularly in the last year since Amazon relaxed its review polices even further from what they were.

For the past two years we have been pointing out how Theos Medical Products, nor selling on Amazon under their product name Chummie, have extensively abused the Amazon reviews. We are copying the article below from  ChummieFraudonAmazonReviews.comas it lays out in some detail the fraud that occurs on Amazon Reviews. Suggestions offered for Amazon to reduce fraud on their reviews are marked by us in RED. It still makes eminent sense. We sincerely hope that Amazon will seriously consider and even adopt these suggestions to ensure the validity and usefulness of Amazon Reviews.

Fraud & Collusion by Sellers to Favorably Stuff their Amazon Product Reviews.

Chummie and Chummie Elite Reviews on Amazon

Having read much about possible fraud by sellers stuffing their product reviews favorably on Amazon so as to get a better reviews rating, we decided to look into it. Having read on bedwettingalarmsdeceitcatcher.blogspot.com the substantial deceit and stuffing being done by Theos Medical Systems with their Chummie products, we decided to examine the 5-stars reviews given to Theos by “users” who were not Amazon “Verified Purchasers” and also had many other non-verified purchases on Amazon. Obviously, such persons could be non-buyers and users of the products, and could be fake reviewers. The issue was whether there was substantial evidence of collusion between Chummie and these reviewers. This exercise and analysis was done on August 11, 2014 and uses Amazon data as of that date. We also continued this examination through September 8, 2014, by which time the extent of the collusion was well established.

We examined a number of such non-Amazon verified reviewers of Theos products. It soon became evident that there were “rings” of persons supporting or "selling" reviews for various products, and the scheme was extensively entwined around very many Amazon products. The evidence is presented in the spread-sheets on the next five pages. The collusion and overlap was so substantial that we restricted ourselves to only ten products apart from the seven that Theos sells under the Chummie name on Amazon.

The probability of so many people in Amazon’s huge buying population buying similar products with substantial overlap is essentially zero. This has to be the result of complicit action by the review writers.

We have also noticed that there must be many “groups” of such "reviewers" that unethical sellers can use. One day after compiling the initial data on the spread-sheet (Page 1) with the names and items reviewed by fake Chummie supporters, we looked at new 5-stars reviews by non-verified buyers for Chummie items. This is a new group of people (or people with new names). Ten additional fake 5-stars reviews were added in less than a day.

There has to be a high degree of duplicity, with the participants either

1)        Payment in Cash: Paid cash by the sellers to post fraudulent and false 5-stars reviews to inflate the Amazon reviews position of the sellers, or

2)        Payment in Kind: Participating in a scheme to provide each other with 5-star reviews for their mutual benefit.

Consequently, payment may be in Cash or Kind. We believe that many payments for reviews are in cash.

We strongly suspect that Chummie is buying 5-stars reviews from these persons. In four (4) days over the period 8/12/14 through 8/15/14, Chummie appears to have purchased thirty-nine (39) more 5-stars reviews from the 38 "persons" listed on Fraud on Amazon Reviews - Page 2 of this site. We have intentionally only referenced the Chummie products given these fake 5-stars reviews, as other products given 5-stars by these professional sellers of Amazon ratings are getting too numerous to describe.

This frantic rate at which Chummie is purchasing 5-stars reviews for its products indicates either desperation for more sales, or a high degree of arrogance and deceit without respect for its customers and/or normal ethics of not creating complete false information to mislead potential customer. This can also be to mislead Amazon, as getting a high rate of 5-stars "reviews" will give them a higher priority in Amazon's placement of Chummie products on Amazon's product pages. This is deception and fraud. This fraud is even more severe if the seller has actively solicited and paid for fake reviews to be posted, either favoring the seller's product, or debasing a competitor's product.

A group of people are colluding, in severe violation of Amazon policies, to artificially raise the review scores of selected Amazon sellers who pay these unethical persons for their illicit service. This may be several groups colluding. There is no doubt about the participation of the sellers in these schemes. Purchasing 5-stars reviews from unethical "buyers" appears to be a mode of operation that unethical sellers on Amazon use. Chummie strongly fits into this group.

We are surprised that Amazon has made it easier for such deceit in recent times by removing their requirement for a reviewer to be an Amazon verified buyer of that item. We must leave it to Amazon to identify the perpetrators and participants of these fraudulent schemes and resulting reviews which have substantially diminished the value of Amazon’s much touted Review System. Let us see what action Amazon takes and how Amazon stops this abuse. Some  appropriate action may be to

1)    Bar these sellers (such as Chummie) from selling on Amazon,

2)    Cancel the accounts of the fakes who "sell" 5-stars reviews to unethical Amazon sellers,

3)    Delete these fake reviews created by these fraudulent persons,

4)    Increase the cost for such illicit sellers by re-instituting the requirement that only Amazon Verified Buyers can provide reviews,

5)    If a Verified Buyer returns a product to Amazon that has been reviewed on Amazon by this buyer, cancel and delete this review,

6)    If there is sufficient evidence that the seller has been involved multiple times in soliciting and purchasing such illicit reviews and having them posted on Amazon,

       a)   Permanently bar the seller from being a seller, or allowing proxies to be sellers on his behalf, and

       b)   If this seller is also the manufacturer of a product, prohibit this product from being sold on Amazon, on any Amazon site, by any seller.

7)    If there is sufficient evidence that the seller has been involved multiple times in misrepresenting himself as a competitor, solicited fake reviews using a competitor's name or identity, and paid for them to be posted on Amazon's reviews, the actions taken by Amazon should be at least as severe as recommended in 6) above, with Amazon taking possible legal action against such a seller.

With their information, knowledge and resources we feel sure that Amazon can resolve this problem IF THEY WANT TO. This is where the problem essentially lies, at Amazon's door. Inadequate efforts, ignoring obvious severe violations, and even "protection" of such "preferred" sellers, when these are brought to Amazon's attention. In such matters, Amazon seems to be oblivious of the fact that the credibility of their review system is being ruined, mostly by unethical sellers, but also by some of Amazon's own actions (or in-actions).

For unethical and fake buyers and sellers, we have made copies of these violations from Amazon's review listings so as to have proof of the illicit acts, even if the fake buyers (reviewers) or the unethical  seller (Chummie in this case) attempt to alter any of the current facts.

We have found that the Chummie Elite alarm on Amazon is fraught with fraudulent reviews. 

NOTE: The situation got so bad that Theos Medical Systems, the maker and supplier of Chummie alarms, was removed as a seller on Amazon.com by Amazon. We shall continue to follow the Chummie Elite's reviews on Amazon, and also its performance on eBay. Chummie cannot manipulate matters on eBay easily, as there are no reviews on eBay to manipulate. Chummie true performance on eBay is deplorable, as is its performance on Amazon would be once all of the phony and "purchased" reviews are removed.

Therapee by Dr. Sagie - How Much Hype is Enough?

Update: Before continuing, please note that almost immediately after we posted this blog entry,  Therapee's price on Amazon was raised to $299.00 . 


We had noticed Therapee recently on Amazon, but had little factual knowledge about it except for the "Reviews" (note the ""?) and obvious internet advertisements for the sale of the product. We must admit that we were concerned with the little we were seeing on Amazon. And really nothing significant and confirmable anywhere else (note the word "confirmable").  Our attention was drawn to the Amazon listing for Therapee when about ten of the reviewers on Amazon were asked some simple straight-forward queries about the product which, in our opinion, any honest reviewer should have answered without any hesitation, but none did. Zip. No responses.  We have copied below these queries asked on Amazon:

Query 1:
"I noticed that you didn't buy this through Amazon. Where did you buy it? Was it cheaper there?"

Query 2:
"Hello. I should mention that I am posting this comment (questions) for you only because you are a reviewer of this product on Amazon.com . I am very confused by this product's page on Amazon. You, as an example, are not regarded as an Amazon Verified Purchaser. I understand that this only means that Amazon is unable to certify that you purchased this product from Amazon.
As you did not purchase this product on Amazon, would you please share with me and other readers where and when you purchased it, and what it cost you? Also, why post your review on Amazon if you did not purchase it here? By itself, your posting a review on Amazon would not puzzle me. But there are presently 67 reviews on Amazon for this product, all of them are excellent, and none are Verified Purchasers. This is very confusing. Would you please enlighten me?
I shall also post this same message on a few more recent reviewers and hope that I can get adequate answers from all of you so as to clarify what I am seeing here. Thank you."

We noticed that queries were made to some of both the "Most Helpful" and "Most Recent" reviewers. Quite a reasonable sample in terms of the queries and the reviewers to whom they were presented. And, as pointed out in Query 2, of the 67 reviews, not one was an Amazon Verified Purchaser. So we looked into this matter further, including talking anonymously to some Amazon customer support persons, and looking at the internet. The following are FACTS:

As of the time and date of this posting:

1.            There are 68 Therapee "reviews" posted on Amazon.com, which is the U.S. selling site of Amazon. U.S. customers order from this site.

2.            64 are 5-stars reviews, and 4 are 4-stars reviews.

3.            As may be expected from the stars given in these reviews, every review is superlative, and none are brief one-liners as are often found even with verified 5-stars reviews.

4.            Almost every review is in very correct English. These review could have been written by a Marketing Professional with very good English writing skills. We must admit that we have not yet come across so many reviews for any product where the English has been so good in almost every review.

5.            NONE of the 68 "reviewers" are Amazon Verified Purchasers, so the validity of these reviews is questionable. We must concede that a non-Amazon verified customer could have legitimately purchased this product elsewhere and had user experience of it. But why would 68 separate persons whose opinions of this device and system were so high-flying, not come down to earth for the brief time it might take to answer such straight-forward questions as copied above? And what is the motive for posting these 68 "opinions" on Amazon?

6.            We asked some Amazon customer service persons if they had ever come across any other product on Amazon where there were approximately as many reviews, ALL of which were NOT Amazon Verified Customers, and where 64 of the total 68 reviewers (94%)  gave the product a 5-stars rating, and the remaining 4 gave a four stars rating. ZERO ratings with 3, 2, or 1-star. Every Amazon representative's response was "No." We expected that answer, as these results are totally beyond our experience as well.

7.            We noted that factual information about the product stated on the Amazon page for the Therapee product was MINIMAL. We have capitalized the word MINIMAL as we have not seen any bedwetting alarm with such a little factual seller-provided information, and especially one selling for $299.00 on Amazon (The highest, by far, for this class of products on Amazon).

8.            Looking at the web-site for Therapee, and looking at their section on "Success Stories," the reader is directed to Amazon reviews.

9.            Since the manufacturer offers so little direct information, and refers the reader to the Amazon reviews, are we to infer that these reviews have come from the manufacturer?

10.          It certainly appears that the Amazon Reviews for this product are intended to also serve as information about this product. But they are vague on actual concrete information, and very high on superlative experiences. Why is the manufacturer not providing complete factual information about Therapee, where the device certainly is a bedwetting alarm?

11.          Looking at the internet and doing a Google search for Dr. Sagie bedwetting (we intentionally left out the word alarm or system or whatever else this item may be called so that we would find the searches likely to lead to this product by the correct Dr. Sagie), the only references were from Dr. Sagie's Therapee site or a site (such as Amazon) on which Dr. Sagie's item was being offered for sale. Any off-Amazon opinions that we found (extremely few) were often written by "Anonymous" and not substantiatable.

12.          Looking at Therapee's site, there was a picture of Dr. Sagie and a younger Mr. Sagie. It is stated that Jacob Sagie has a Ph.D. and is a "PsychoTherapist," and Mr. Sagie has an MA in, we assume, one of many areas for which an Arts degree may be awarded. It is not stated that Dr. Sagie is a medical doctor and neither of the Sagies seem to be electrical engineers.

13.          The claim that Therapee is "The World's # 1 Bedwetting Solution" is totally unsubstantiated, and must be ruled as extreme hyperbole. It reminds us of the frequent excessive claims of another manufacturer/seller on Amazon, who has also used such obvious exaggerations. Not at all professional!

14.          Some of the general claims made for the Therapee alarm are typical unsubstantiated hype and absurd fear-mongering, which only a marketing oriented person with a poor sense of ethics would imagine and then publicly state. There is little or no basis in reality that we could identify for some of their claims or statements.

15.          There was one address provided of their "International Office" located in Haifa, Israel. No other physical office or address was suggested.

16.          A look at the Warranty section on the site certainly raises red flags, particularly for U.S. customers towards whom the Amazon.com page is addressed. Of great concern is the statement: "The customer is responsible for shipping and handling costs." Our concern is that no place other than in Haifa, Israel is mentioned. So the buyer would have to pay for shipping the defective item to Israel and back again. Has a buyer looked at these shipping costs, and the time involved?

We could go on. But let's summarize what we see here:

1.            Slick marketing. VERY SLICK marketing. Probably highly fictional, particularly for Amazon Reviews.

2.            If you live in Israel and want to avail yourself of Dr. Sagie's Therapee device and related services and don't mind the costs, try it and find out for yourself.

3.            If you live in the U.S., are a true believer, have the money and time for this item, an uncontrollable compulsion to spend $299.00 as asked for by Therapee on Amazon and possibly much more if anything becomes defective, and cannot even imagine spending less money, or probably MUCH less for another alarm, then what more can we say?

Deceit on the Internet: Product Blogs --- Strong Deceit.

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Deceit on the Internet: Product Blogs.

Continuing with our discussion of Deceit on the Internet, as suggested and explained at http://stopdeceit.blogspot.com/2013/07/stop-deceit-on-internet.htmlwe shall look at how product blogs are used for deceit.


Product Blogs:

This is something that each interested person can do for themselves. We did a Google search by the product names for the four products that we had considered in the earlier post of "Deceit on the Internet: Shopping Reviews." We can only give you a summary and our “feelings” based on our search. We only searched for the four products, A, B, C, and D which were evaluated in our earlier comments about Shopping Reviews.

For both Product A and Product B there were a large number of listings on product blogs. It is difficult to distinguish much difference between the techniques or results for Product A versus Product B. They both seemed to be reading out of the same book, and had rather similar results. So the next few paragraphs summarizes our thoughts for both Product A and Product B.

Both manufacturers were very aggressive in trying to “place” their products with any and all parties that would offer a "good" opinion about these products on their blogs, or help in spreading “the word” in a "good" sense about these products on the internet. Almost without exception, these blogging parties were individuals or small groups of individuals. Some stated that they were writing this blog entry because they had been given this product to review and then keep. We are aware that there are some blogs whose “owners” will write whatever they are told to write and enter that into their blogs for a monetary fee or other compensation. These blogs were also represented.

Both manufacturers also compensated these blogs by offering “discount coupons” through these blogs, which the blog owner would hopefully benefit from by attracting more traffic and consequently more paid advertising of some sort or the other. Many of these blogs were obviously providing statements (or reviews) from the manufacturers, or were copying significant elements of the manufacturers’ advertising in their “reviews.” Even blogs set up with names associated with bedwetting or bedwetting alarms were essentially servicing the manufacturers, and had doubtful or no validity or credibility in our opinion. Furthermore, some blog writers were blindly taking for granted the validity of other reviews on the internet (which we have already demonstrated can be quite fictional) and using them to validate their preferences, if these reviews so suited them. This may sound absurd and is undoubtedly unethical, but there is a lot of selective adoption of possibly unreliable information, if it suits the reviewer’s objectives.

As an illustration of how a manufacturer may actually advertise to entice other bloggers and persons to promote their product, we have copied an actual example from the internet, leaving out the blog and manufacturer’s name:


Bedwetting Alarm Giveaway & Blogger Opp!

This is a FREE blogger opportunity (with paid options)

Open to US Residents Only

Sign up:  April 14, 2013 to April 28, 2013

Giveaway Dates:   May 1, 2013 to May 15, 2013

Participation Rules:

·        Participation is FREE (with paid options).

·        You agree to promote the giveaway once it goes live at least 3x per week

Pricing:

·        One free link of your choice - Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest only with announcement post

·        $5.00 fee to waive announcement post

·        The following additionallinks are $1.00 each:

o   Facebook

o   Twitter

o   Pinterest

I will be posting a reminder for this once it goes live! 

We did not find such issues for Products C and D to any significant extent.

Bearing in mind that Products A and B are relatively new compared to Products C and D, we must assume that the manufacturers of A and B were trying to make their presence known on the internet. It is unfortunate that both manufacturers had no qualms about paying (in cash or kind) to having their products touted on these blogs. These reviews and blogs are bogus and fake. Any reader of these blogs must remember that they have poor credibility and are often mouthpieces for whoever may be compensating them in any way. And more individuals are trying to make an extra buck by starting such “for hire” blogs. This is not a good trend as two sets of greedy people, the people setting up and running blogs, and the manufacturers and sellers, are only increasing deceit on the internet by fake postings on these blogs.

We should also point out that many blogs run by organizations that have developed a reputation in the heath advisory area can also be quite deceitful. The organization running the blog in its name may be unbiased and innocent, but members posting reviews, and moderators responsible for editing these reviews can be quite biased. Moderators have been know to delete entries that may question their biases and opinions, and even  make it impossible for opposing views to be registered by "closing" that thread while maintaining on the blog only the opinions that the moderator supports, and get away with it because of inadequate controls on the part of the owner organization.

In conclusion, we must agree with Stop Deceit, that many blogs run by private individuals, small groups of persons, and even normally reliable organizations without adequate controls, can have substantial fake reviews on them. If Consumer Reports reviews bedwetting alarms, you can expect unbiased reviews. But “Moms-bedwetting-alarms-reviews” (the name is fictional and not intended to criticize anyone) probably should be ignored, unless you find its reading entertaining. Caution and prudence are highly recommended before the reader accepts reviews at their face value from these blogs.

Deceit on the Internet: Shopping Reviews

Deceit on the Internet                                                                         (July 19, 2013)


We were intrigued by an entry (comment) by Anon on our entry for Chummie: Strong Deceit by Perversion on July 15, 2013. Anon referenced a blog http://stopdeceit.blogspot.com/titled Stop Deceit on the Internet. The author(s), using the name “Stop Deceit,” gave a decent description of deceit on the internet. Stop Deceit gave three basic sources of deceit on the internet:
1.       Manufacturer’s Web Sites,
2.       Product Blogs, and
3.       Shopping Reviews.
We would strongly recommend that readers look at http://stopdeceit.blogspot.com/ .

We have been systematically addressing deceit on manufacturers’ blog sites for bedwetting alarm manufacturers on this blog. We felt intrigued about how much deceit there may be with respect to bed wetting alarms on shopping blogs and shopping reviews. As we are following the bedwetting alarm industry, we thought we should look at bedwetting alarm related deceit in Product Blogs and Shopping Reviews


Shopping Reviews:

We chose Amazon.com for our basic analysis, as Amazon is undoubtedly the biggest shopping site (even for bedwetting alarms) and we can expect the most buyer reviews. Furthermore, Amazon does provide more information about the reviewer and the reviewer’s history at Amazon, so that we could better analyze the reviewer. To get a sufficiently large sample, we arbitrarily decided to look at “wired” alarms currently being sold on Amazon so that their reviews would be available to us. We also decided to only consider alarms where there were more than fifty reviews, so that we could have a reasonable sample size. Even there, to somewhat limit the time we might have to spend on this task, we selected four alarms which we felt might adequately cover the different styles and prices available.

Our intent was to try and get a plausible idea of the extent to which the reviews were unduly biased, and whether they were biased in favor of or against that particular alarm. In other words, we were attempting to identify the extent to which reviews might have been provided by shills or touts of the manufacturer (which would unduly favor that item) or by competitors (which would unduly bad-mouth the item). We then came up with a set of criteria to apply to each and every revue for that product on Amazon. We do want to point out that the criteria are subjective and are not necessarily perfect in their ability to identify touts or shills. But we feel that the identified reviews are much more likely to be unduly biased, and not be honest reviews by honest and actual buyers.

The following table shows the  results for the number of possibly biased reviews out of the total, and further breaks them up into positive bias (perhaps shills for the manufacturer/seller) and negative bias (perhaps shills for competitors). They are expressed as a percentage of the total identified biased reviews (rounded to the nearest whole percent):

Product A:           34%        Positive Bias       32%        Negative Bias     2%

Product B:           31%        Positive Bias       25%        Negative Bias     6%

Product C:           11%        Positive Bias         9%        Negative Bias     2%

Product D:             2%        Positive Bias         2%        Negative Bias     0%

 

We must confess that the high percentage of bias that we judged to be present for Product A came as no surprise to us. We also see that a huge proportion of those are positively biased, perhaps unduly raising the "ratings" for Product A. We must “assume” that the manufacturer is quite desperate or non-caring about using deceitful reviews so as to raise the ratings of their product. So the “ratings” that you see on Amazon for this product are possibly very biased (skewed) on the high side and wrong.

 

Product B was the newest of the four products examined, and we were somewhat surprised that the percentage of possibly fake reviews was so high. The primary difference between Product B and Product A is that B has not flooded Amazon with possibly biased positive ratings as much as Product A might have. So the proportion of positive to negative biased reviews is less for Product B than for Product A. Never-the-less, Product B also appears to be overindulging in introducing biased reviews into Amazon.

 

Product C is an established product. Although the percentage of possibly fake reviews was lower, we still considered it to be high. The ratio of positive to negative biased reviews is about the same as for Product B.

 

Product D is also an established product. Here, our surprise was that the bias was so low, as compared to the other products. Without mentioning names, we must commend the manufacturer of Product D for our not noticing much presence of shills and touts in the reviews of this product.

 

In conclusion, we must agree with Stop Deceit, that even the “best” of shopping sites, using their own criteria for weeding out fake reviews, was unable to prevent a substantial number of possibly fake reviews from being presented on Amazon.com . For Product A and Product B, we estimate that about one-third of the reviews could be fake. This is a huge fraction of the total reviews. Consequently, do not take these reviews as “the honest truth.” Take them with a grain of salt, or even a shovelful of salt.