Some fake reviews are also being driven by Facebook groups where sellers offer buyers money if they write positive product reviews, said McCabe. The likelihood that a consumer will buy a product that has five reviews is 270% higher than the likelihood they will buy a product with zero reviews, according to a 2017 report by Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center. "The real losers here are the consumers who are possibly believing many of these fake positive reviews, or this artificial padding of reviews, because they might see 100 positive reviews, and then there may only be 60 or 70 of them that are legitimate," he said. He is now a consultant to sellers on the site. The harm is to people who rely on reviews when deciding on a purchase, said Chris McCabe, a former policy enforcement investigator at Amazon tasked with stopping scams and fraud. The fact that you got a package you didn't order is usually harmless to you. It violates eBay policy to send unsolicited merchandise to customers or falsify reviews and can result in eBay restricting sellers' accounts or suspending them from the site.Įxperts also say it's difficult to quantify the frequency of such scams because it can be hard for companies to know whether reviews are fake, and scams often go unreported by consumers. Amazon would not say how how many brushing scams have been found on the site or how many sellers have been removed due to these scams.Īn eBay spokesperson said in an email that brushing schemes "do not appear to be highly prevalent" on the site. "Third-party sellers are prohibited from sending unsolicited packages to customers and we take action on those who violate our policies, including withholding payments, suspending or removing selling privileges, or working with law enforcement," an Amazon spokesperson said in an email. ![]() But "the has long gone after marketers that use fake reviews," said David Vladeck, a former director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection and a law professor at Georgetown University.Īmazon says its policy prohibits sellers sending unsolicited merchandise to customers, and that sellers can be removed from the site for doing so. It's not illegal to send customers unordered merchandise. The agent looked at Blinn's account and found nothing wrong with it. She obviously didn't know about it," she said. Blinn notified Amazon of the issue, but a customer service agent "didn't really understand what I was saying. "Every two weeks.I get another package in the mail of just random stuff I never ordered," she said. Jen Blinn of Thousand Oaks, California, told CNN Business she has been receiving random packages since June, including most recently a briefcase, a backpack, a hair straightener and a coffee-cup warmer. ![]() Unsuspecting recipients have also found boxes with goods ranging from dog pooper-scoopers to power cords to soap dispensers on their doorsteps. 'Brushing' scam: NC residents urged to not plant mystery seeds they didn't orderīut it's not just seeds.
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