E-commerce giants took action against fake reviews, after the strictness of the governments

With the rise of online shopping, one thing that worries e-commerce companies, retailers, and buyers the most is fake reviews. After India, now after the warnings of the market regulator in many countries of Europe, companies like Amazon and Google have increased their strictness on fake reviews. Amazon has blamed social media sites for the flourishing of the fake reviews industry. Amazon says that the cottage industry of fake reviews is growing unabated on social media and no steps are being taken to stop it. Due to this, the buyers are also going through a bad experience.

How big the challenge of fake reviews has become can be gauged from the fact that Amazon, the largest e-commerce company, had to block more than 200 million fake reviews last year. The company said that at least 23,000 such groups were running which were working to write fake reviews and at least 46 million people were involved in this. The company says that fake reviews were able to influence consumer buying decisions.

Dharmesh Mehta, head of Amazon's consumer trust team, says that it is a vicious cycle, in which these fraudsters are harming both the consumer and the seller. They tell the seller that they will bring you fake reviews and go to a group of consumers and say that if you give a five-star review about a service or product, they will give you this much money or a gift card. In this way, they are buying fake reviews and selling them as a marketing service for a brand or manufacturer.

Britain's Competition Regulatory Organization 'Competition and Marketing Authority' (CMA) said last year that companies like Amazon and Google are not doing anything to end this problem before it grows. As a result, businesses that follow the rules are at a loss, while companies that follow the wrong practices are reaping the benefits. Since then, Amazon claims that it has also started taking the help of AI to deal with the challenge of fake reviews.

Amazon claims to have sued over 10,000 Facebook group administrators who run the industry of fake reviews. When asked about the heavy presence of such groups on its platform, Meta said that it is 'continually investing in new technologies and methods to protect its users from such content'.

Last week, Google also claimed that it has filed a consumer protection lawsuit against a group that created 350 fake business profiles and got around 14,000 misleading reviews. Not only this, but this group was also selling consumer data to business groups. Google also claims that in 2022 alone, it failed attempts to create 2 crore fake business profiles and saved 1 lakh 85 thousand businesses from misuse of its platform.

From November 2022, the Consumer Ministry of India has also started cracking down on fake reviews. Under the new rules issued, action has also been talked about imposing fines on positive reviews and five-star ratings by paying money and getting negative reviews done for other companies. There is a provision of a fine ranging from Rs 10 to Rs 50 lakh for doing this intentionally. Companies have also been asked to take action for not publishing negative reviews on their platforms.