Amazon commits to stepping up fake-review fight after UK watchdog's investigation

Britain’s competition regulator says Amazon has pledged to beef up its systems to combat fake online reviews

LONDON -- Amazon has pledged to beef up fight against fake reviews, Britain's competition regulator said Friday after an investigation into whether big online platforms are doing enough to crack down on phony online ratings for products and services.

The Competition and Markets Authority said it secured the “undertakings” from Amazon, after getting a similar agreement earlier this year from Google to clamp down on rogue reviews plaguing the internet.

The company promised to strengthen its existing systems for fighting fake reviews. It will also tackle catalog abuse, which involves sellers boosting star ratings for a product by hijacking good reviews from a completely different one.

As an example, a shopper might come across a pair of headphones with a five-star rating. But, after looking closer, most of the reviews are for a mobile phone charger, the watchdog said.

As part of its commitments, Amazon has agreed to sanction anyone caught using these tactics. Businesses could be banned from selling on the Amazon website and users posting fake reviews could be banned from posting them, the CMA said.

The watchdog's chief executive, Sarah Cardell, said that so many people shop on Amazon and “star ratings and reviews have a huge impact on their choices.”

Amazon's pledges “mean people can make decisions with greater confidence – knowing that those who seek to pull the wool over their eyes will be swiftly dealt with.”

The pledges apply to Amazon's U.K. website. The company said in a statement that it has zero tolerance for fake reviews and that the measures build on Amazon's existing efforts to tackle them.

“We invest significant resources to proactively stop fake reviews ever appearing on our store, including on expert human investigators and machine learning models that analyse thousands of data points to detect risk," the company said.

The CMA opened its investigations into Amazon and Google in 2021 to examine whether the two companies broke U.K. consumer law by failing to protect shoppers. It began looking into phony reviews on some big websites amid the boom in online shopping fueled by the coronavirus pandemic.