Amazon’s customer reviews have long been a go-to resource for consumers researching prospective purchases. Unfortunately, fake customer reviews—product critiques commissioned by merchants and manufacturers in an effort to bolster their own products’ reputations or undermine their competitors’—have been around for almost as long. Now, in its quest to maintain the integrity of its customer reviews, Amazon is targeting an unlikely group: the fake-review writers themselves, all 1,114 of whom advertised their availability to write the phony reviews on Fiverr, a website where freelancers offer services like converting documents from one file format to another for as little as five dollars. In its other attempts to crack down on phony product evaluations, Amazon has named as defendants the websites where phony-review writers solicit work. Unlike those defendant sites, however, which had URLs including and similar to “buyamazonreviews.com,”…
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