Beware of fake Amazon, Google reviews

Amazon is cracking down on fake reviews. The online giant has filed a suit against two companies for giving money or product to leave a positive review.  The tactics used by third-party sellers to generate fake reviews have become so bad in the last five years, Amazon included a policy saying it's against their terms of service to incentivize reviews. 

Steven Pope, an expert who focuses on Amazon's operations, says fake reviews are bad news for both businesses and customers.

"It just makes it really hard for the consumer to really know what to trust," he said, also noting Amazon has recently started making several changes. Particularly, Pope said more competition is going from Chinese companies.

"Increasing competition from how you sell on the platform from the Amazon aggregators," he said, "about $13 billion has entered the space in the last year alone to go buy Amazon brands. And then, Amazon making that maturity go up and harder to sell on the platform. So that's the reason why fake reviews are showing up is because it's really hard to sell on Amazon."

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