Amazon said Monday (Oct. 14) that it has been using legal action and other methods to combat fake reviews and prevent those reviews from being seen by customers.
The company proactively blocked more than 250 million suspected fake reviews in 2023 and pursued legal action against more than 150 fake review brokers during that same year, Amazon said in a Monday press release.
“Product reviews are core to the Amazon shopping experience, providing customers with invaluable insights and honest opinions from fellow shoppers,” the release said. “Amazon understands the pivotal role these reviews play in helping consumers make informed purchasing decisions, and is dedicated to preserving the trustworthiness of reviews.”
To detect and prevent fake reviews, and ensure only authentic reviews are published, Amazon uses technology that helps it monitor and enforce its policies, according to the release.
The company then suspends, bans or takes legal action against those who violate the policies, the release said.
Amazon filed its first lawsuit against fake review brokers in 2015 and continues to do so to prevent them from facilitating fake reviews, per the release. It recently filed one such suit in conjunction with the Better Business Bureau (BBB).
“At Amazon, we understand that businesses of all sizes rely on product reviews to attract customers and grow their brand,” Claire O’Donnell, director of selling partner trust and store integrity at Amazon, said in the release. “In addition to our proactive controls, legal actions ensure that we hold these bad actors accountable, stop their illicit schemes at the source, and prevent them from harming customers in Amazon’s store and beyond.”
In another, separate effort to combat fake reviews, it was reported in June that a judge ruled that Yelp could continue a trademark infringement and unfair competition lawsuit against a company that advertised that it could remove “bad” reviews from the platform.
Scammers abound on social media and fake reviews plague crowd-sourced review websites, PYMNTS reported in June 2020. At that time, it was reported that Yelp removes 25% of all submitted reviews as likely falsehoods and that TripAdvisor identified 60 different review farms in 2015 alone and took legal action against them.
The Justice Department reportedly told financial regulators that it didn’t have sufficient evidence to block the proposed merger between Capital One and Discover.
This decision would allow the two banking regulators that must approve the deal — the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — to approve the transaction, Bloomberg reported Thursday (April 3).
The Justice Department told the regulators of its decision in a confidential memo, the report said, citing unnamed sources.
The Justice Department did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
Staff at the Justice Department were divided about whether the merger should be challenged, and the new antitrust division chief, Gail Slater, made the decision that there was not enough evidence to do so, according to the report.
Earlier, under the Biden administration, antitrust officials at the Justice Department had said they had some concerns that the deal could harm competition, per the report.
Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department looked at not only the competitive factors of the deal, which is what it normally focuses on in bank mergers, but also how the deal might affect different customer segments, fees, interest rates, bank locations, product variety, network effects, interoperability and customer service, the report said.
Capital One announced its planned acquisition of Discover in February 2024, saying the deal would create a global payments platform with 70 million merchant acceptance points in more than 200 countries and territories.
“Our acquisition of Discover is a singular opportunity to bring together two very successful companies with complementary capabilities and franchises, and to build a payments network that can compete with the largest payments networks and payments companies,” Richard Fairbank, founder, chairman and CEO of Capital One, said at the time in a press release.
The deal took a step toward completion in December when it received approval from the Office of the Delaware State Bank Commissioner.
It took another step forward in February, when the two companies said that more than 99% of their shareholders had voted to approve the merger. When announcing the votes, Capital One said it expected the transaction to close early this year, subject to approval by the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
