Amazon has filed a lawsuit against more than 1,000 people who Amazon claims have offered to write fake reviews of products that are listed on Amazon. More specifically, Amazon is cracking down on those who sell a fake review writing service on Fiverr.
Years ago, I had an account on Fiverr. I was trying to use it to earn some money by writing short articles for people’s websites. Overall, I felt that I was unsuccessful there, so I closed my account and moved on. I hadn’t thought about Fiverr until I read about the Amazon lawsuit.
Amazon, however, has taken a close look at Fiverr, and was not pleased by what it saw. To be clear, Amazon has not sued Fiverr itself. Instead, Amazon has sued thousands of “John Does” who have used Fiverr.com as a way to sell fake positive or 5-star Amazon reviews.
Bloomberg Business reports that the lawsuit follows an extensive investigation done by Amazon in which it communicated with some of the people who were selling fake reviews. Every “gig” on Fiverr costs $5 (hence the name). Personally, I don’t see how making $5 is worth the risk of ending up in a lawsuit like this one.
In its court filing, Amazon wrote:
“Amazon is bringing this action to protect its consumers from this misconduct, by stopping defendants and uprooting the ecosystem in which they participate. Although Amazon has successfully requested removal of similar listings from Fiverr in the past, the removal of individual listings does not address the root cause of the issue or serve as a sufficient deterrent to the bad actors engaged in creating and purchasing fraudulent reviews.”
“This action is the next step in a long-term effort to ensure these providers of fraudulent reviews do not offer their illicit services through other channels and to take enforcement action against the dishonest sellers and manufacturers who use those services.”
Fiverr is working with Amazon to resolve this problem. These type of “gigs”, that involve violating a third party’s terms of service, (in this case, Amazon’s) actually break Fiverr’s terms of service. As a result, Fiverr has been doing take-downs of those kinds of “gigs”.
In short, about a thousand people, who broke the terms of service on both Fiverr and Amazon, are now seeing their gigs removed from Fiverr. These people have been sued by Amazon. Cheaters never prosper.