NEVER Trust Amazon Reviews! 

Correction: I was unaware that the brand FunWares reached out to a member of my team located in the United States. That member asked to have the items sent to me, but since I did not have any direct contact with Funwares, neither myself, the UK team, nor my family knew where these had come from. The brand did not just send it out of nowhere. Further, I am not alleging the brand paid for any fake reviews. The miscommunication prompted the investigation into this topic, but I do not believe that FunWares fakes its user reviews or pays for any user reviews. As stated in the video I enjoyed using the product and make no representations or believe that the company has done anything wrong or misleading - that said, it doesn’t change the fact that these types of scams are very prevalent online!

Well I never read the positive reviews anymore on Amazon. I mostly scan the negatives to see if there's any consistent issues. If they are only "shipping got damaged" or something clearly that the manufacturer warned against and the buyer still bought it..."this was too small or big" kind of thing (measure before you order, people)...I'm good to go. Is it me or does anyone else skip over the positives?

I’ve been delivering for Amazon for 3 years and the amount of people telling me they haven’t ordered the parcel is insane, glad you made this video

The biggest scam is when companies edit their entire product page, where they received amazing reviews for an old product, and replace it with their new products. This makes customers think that the reviews are for the current products but in reality the reviews are many years old and was for the old product. Xiaomi and Samsung are expert in doing this scam.

Meanwhile, Amazon randomly banned me from reviewing products. I used to enjoy writing a review of things I bought there and detailing the type of things that I find helpful to know when I'm buying something. The experience of being banned for no reason and having to fight with them to unblock me made me stop doing reviews. Just soured me on it. So they allow a lot of fakes and treat their actual customers like crooks.

As an AI model, I cannot provide information from personal experience, however, this video is a great review of the "Amazon Review Scandal". It excellently describes the problem and stays entertaining.

This is why I almost always watch reviews on RU-vid, while making sure they aren't sponsored.

I once gave a 2 star review on a product on Amazon that I thought deserved the 2 stars and the company emailed me and told me if I took down the bad review and replaced it with a 5 star one they would send me a $50 gift card to Amazon… I was shocked!

The scam I noticed on Amazon was just how many products were raised in price in the past few weeks and then "put on sale" for Amazon Prime Day. I saw quite a few items that had a nice % off, but when I checked their price histories, it was just the normal price for the products. I thought this was illegal...

The way Arun tells us "This could be a sign of data leak" and procedes to let us know about surfshark that he uses for years now is hillarious

My wife was impacted by something like this and we got some really odd items from it. Like a multicolored shiny flag and a panda hat. After we confirmed none of our accounts were impacted and nobody sent it to us as a gag gift or something, we looked more into it and found it's a common scam practice.

A couple years ago I looked at my reviews and there was two fake reviews that had been made for things iv never looked at let alone bought or reviewed. The scarier thing was they were medical items like a home x-ray machine MRI scan or something else medical can't remember exactly what it was but there were two different items and both were medical. All Amazon did was delete the reviews.

This happened to me. Exactly this. The item was a low quality digital TV antenna. I spent weeks on the phone with Amazon trying to get to the bottom of it, and most of the reps I spoke seemed to assume I was the scammer.

Amazon has a bit of the blame tho. Almost every negative review I have left on any product has been rejected and needed to be rewritten to be "more product related" but as soon as I swapped bad remarks for good, it gets approved with no issues from Amazon, just like any other positive review I have left.

This was this very brushing scandal when a few years ago suddenly a lot of people started receiving small satchels of random plant seeds from amazon without ever ordering anything like that. Many feared they were something dangerous - turned out they were ordinary and harmless seeds. The scammers just needed to send something to obtain a tracking number, and this something nooded to be cheap aand insignificanrt, so sending a lot of them to many customers doesn't cost a lot, and the customers who receive it surely won't bother sending it back.

Another problem is people who give fake negative reviews and complain to amazon to get refund and keep the item for themselves

Arun’s uploading schedules is on point. And each video is a goddamn masterpiece.

In Germany I've heard about a similar case years ago. Some guy received endless amounts of deliveries he never ordered from Chinese companies because sending stuff they can't sell to random adresses is cheaper than paying Amazon the storage fees or even the disposal.

I refuse to buy anything on Amazon again. They aren’t stealing my money anymore.

Thanks for the update brother, I see the fake reviews and leave things I want on hold and see more upcoming reviews and see if close friends and family have the product for me to test out and go from there. I have had companies message me and ask me to change my review for gift cards or another product. Gotta be careful everyone! I love the idea of item purchase date and price on the review!!!

I love how he took so much time off the actual topic of the video just to explain to us about fake reviews and haters, this man is the best for real

Thanks for explaining this. I’m an Amazon seller, honestly doing my business with everything above board. A few weeks ago I had a customer email me that someone sent them my product for free and they didn’t know who. I was perplexed and said it must have been a gift. Other people told me there was a scam involved, I just didn’t understand what it was. Amazon does try hard to mitigate these black hat tactics and genuine sellers like myself are afraid to step any toes outside the lines because we don’t want to risk our accounts. However there are millions of Chinese sellers and others who use all these crazy tactics. It does make it hard to sell against them. Still I would not resort to doing these things. I really hope that Amazon does come up with more ways to fight these issues while not penalising genuine sellers like myself.

Probably one of the most interesting reviews you made. I was thinking of publishing a book on Amazon and you outlined Amazon functionality by showing how as a user we get scammed

I once sat down and wrote like 5-10 genuine reviews for Amazon products that I purchased and liked. They all got flagged and rejected by Amazon because my behavior was bot-like I guess? When I followed up with customer service to try to get my reviews published, it didn't go anywhere. So in trying to weed out bad reviews, Amazon also prevented real reviews from being published and basically discouraged me from ever reviewing anything ever again.

this hits home for me. I've been an Amazon Prime member since 2014 and I have 100s of reviews of products, good reviews and bad reviews. One day out of the blue Amazon decided they didn't want me reviewing purchased products anymore and they banned me from reviewing products, saying it appears that I was compensated for a review, which is not allowed on Amazon (this just happened to happen after I left a 1-star review of a product). I contacted Amazon customer service and they were absolutely no help, they wouldn't even tell me what review i had supposedly been compensated for. I must have chatted with 5 or 6 different Amazon reps and all of them refused to give me any information and told me they would not restore my ability to review products. To this day I still can't review anything, and even worse I'm not even allowed to ask a question about a product. Not being able to review a product, especially if it sucks or is defective is frustrating, but not being able to ask a question about the product in downright infuriating. Because of Amazon's asinine mistake and policy, I now end up returning about half of my purchases because of not being able to ask about details or features of the items.

The timing of this is crazy. I just recently purchased a small telescope off Amazon and when it arrived the box had a little note inside that said something along the lines of "review the product for 5 stars for a chance of 25$ (or 25% off, i don't remember)". I genuinely remember thinking how suspicious that was, even though the product arrived and it seems to work, I can't help but feel suspicious of it.

Man! You do a lot of research. Thank you. It's a crazy world out there and it's only going to get more crazy. Thanx for the work you do.

Wow. What a rewarding rabbit hole. Amazing video mate, I've been following you for years, and this was absolutely conclusive detective work. Really well done!

I find it quite funny Arun tells about how surfshark will protect us from data breaches, while his own adress got breached 🤭😂

I find that shopping on Amazon is actually a lot of work because you have to do all this research not only to find a product you want, but to go through the reviews to see if they seem fake. I do this for most items I buy. Some items that are brands or an item I am already familiar with I don't have to do that much effort. Also when I do reviews I try to be detailed so people reading it will realize this is a real review and not a fake one. It is a shame that so many scams are out there. Heck, the internet is basically a scam. The anonymity of online entity's makes it too easy. I don't think this will ever change much. I hope that Amazon and others can help reduce the problem, but I am not holding my breath. It all comes down the old adage "BUYER BEWARE"

I have been an Amazon Vine Voice for the past year. Amazon actively encourages leaving accurate reviews that express your real opinion. They frequently punish people who are overly positive on all their reviews. Also, Amazon provides a very large list of products that you can select from, but from that list we can pick and choose. Most products are from unheard of brands, but I have found numerous good quality products on there. It is a very good program and I believe it does help to weed out the scams and terrible products.

Thanks for the information. Most of this i think many of us knew but its nice to have it all explained and there were many things I personally wasn't fully aware of.

I was browsing for a wireless mic and found one with over 3,000 reviews. A browse through them showed that the seller was just switching out products and stacking new reviews on top of previous items sold.

We NEED more of this from you. You are big enough to make people aware of these scams. Keep up the good work!

Well done raising awareness to this. Amazon wont be happy but they need to fix this.

I once had a random delivery of a tiny little key carabiner. Never ordered it, and then I figured out it was part of an Amazon review scam. Its crazy

No matter the topic, Arun always entertains us in a next level way, keep going Arun!

Chat gpt says: "Wow, this video really opened my eyes to the extent of fake reviews on Amazon! It's shocking how some companies resort to such deceptive tactics. As a savvy shopper, I'll definitely be more cautious when relying on reviews for my purchases. Kudos to 'Whose the Boss' for shedding light on this issue and helping consumers make more informed decisions. Keep up the great work!"

I miss being able to look at a product in a store and judging how good a product is by feeling it.

I am in the hospitality industry from past 10+ years. Now imagine this review scandal for the restaurants you order food from. A group of scammers are basically controlling what you eat and people have no idea !

7:22 ".. a prime-ate" 💀😂

Best way I found to “verify” reviews is not to read the amazon reviews but to look up the item I’m interested in on RU-vid, find a review with a reviewer that specifically shows they have said product in their possession and pay attention to the product release date and when the products actually shipped.

I once ordered something and it came with a card "We will pay you £5 if you write a 5 star review"

Thought this was happening to me when i suddenly started getting smart vacuums i didn't order. After some digging it turned out not to be the case and instead was a seller getting rid of old stock. It was more costly to have amazon process it and ship it back then it was to just send them to people who bought from them before.

I think it's great that Arun and other big tech reviewers are out here teaching people about the dangerous and sleazy things going on in these online marketplaces. It's really important things for consumers to know, and many less tech savvy people don't think about things like this. So Arun, thank you for watching out for us!

I actually used to be part of a facebook group that gave the merch away for free for positive reviews. I collected the data and contacted Amazon. They hung up on me and didnt care.

I literally called this out in a review a couple of years ago and got my account muted for "unusual activity". I can still buy stuff, just not review anything.

I am receiving few notifications on my Amazon Alexa, to rate the products I have brought last month. If I check my account purchases, I don't see any products mentioned by it

Absolutely crazy! I had my doubts already about fake reviews but after watching I'm scared to buy anything off Amazon ever again as I have always checked the reviews before purchasing. Thank you for this.

I can only imagine the amount of hard work and time that goes into the making of such videos. Your recent videos spreading awareness have been really good and informative. You're doing a really fantastic job, buddy. Thanks a lot!

Yup! I unfortunately did this. I was short on cash and ran into someone doing it. It was an easy way to make money but eventually Amazon caught on to what I was doing. (I can no longer post reviews)

Seeing an Amazon ad before this video was perfection

Right as Arun snapped at 9:58 i got an ad. Talk about perfect timing.

The scariest part is, there's not much they can do about a lot of these as technology advances and more scamming options because available.

I've recently been down a rabbit-hole looking at various electrical items on Amazon and noticed that almost every item has a 1-star review saying that it's dangerous and set on fire / melted. I think there might be a small industry of people who deliberately destroy your competitors products and leave bad reviews for them. I've seen it for power strips, usb chargers, hair dryers etc. Either that or these products aren't as safe as we think they are...

Great video, as expected. But that Stardust crusaders ringtone (3:43) was unexpected lol. I have the same ringtone

Informative! A prime (pun intended) example of a quality video! I've know most of the points raised here but learned that the seller can edit listings to add 'variations', and that ability explains why some product listings are so varied in their options lol

I've always known there were many fake reviews on Amazon bit never realised how easy it was. Its now down to gut feeling and comparing the product features against others and then checking some positive, negative and middling reviews. It's a lot of effort but it's the only way to have some comfort that you aren't just wasting your money

Its a world wide problems, and wide platform problems. There is other platform with fake reviews, from Restaurant Reviews, to other E-markets, even Fake Dating reviews. This is crazy. Imagine how huge the fake review market is.

This is an excellent video Arun. And I wasn't even thinking about stuff like this until I watched this video. And now when I'm on Amazon it's always going to be a seed in my head

3:22 i dont work 😂

I love how Mrwhosetheboss goes in-depth on the latest tech products. He doesn't just do a superficial review; he really takes the time to understand how the products work and what they're capable of. This makes his videos really informative and helpful.

I always wondered why some reviews would say " really cheap,good deal blah blah" when it isn't a good deal.

My father and I kept receiving different cheap items from amazon a few years ago that we never ordered. Most of the time it was cheap cables but one time it was an echo dot. I wondered what that was about. Now, I know.

Heyyy that's JoJo ringtone....i got the same ringtone on my phonee 😂 ( 3:44 )

The listing change thing makes so much sense I was in the market for a battery pack for my phone back when i played a lot of Pokémon GO and found one that had really great reviews. When i read the reviews they were for everything from t-shirts to power tools and was thinking the site was broken. I reported it multiple times as confusing and amazon never did anything about it even when i checked a year later lol

My mother's car was hit in our driveway by Amazon prime delivery , Amazon has to pay for it , that was in May , last month her car went to the repair shop. Just yesterday we out it was toedle. Mom needs new car again.

I am an Amazon Influencer, so a lot of companies send me products to do videos on, but those were always ones I had spoke with and had terms. Every once in a while I get a random package that ask me to leave a 5 star review or return the item...WTH, I never even ask for the item. There are also sites that are for Influencers that have you buy the product, make a video for the company and then they refund your purchase and pay you. To me this just inflates their "purchased" numbers and I think it is against Amazon TOS, so I steer clear of those sites. Of course there are also the products that have a note in them saying if you leave a 5 star review, they will refund you. A lot of the Shoppable videos on Amazon say "Customer Review" when in fact they are Influencers who make commission from you watching their video and purchasing. So much dishonesty, it makes buying a quality product hard.

This has happened to my family a few years ago. They were some weird body products. We had no idea what happened but now I can tell them what I just found out. Thanks

I wish I got random fun packages at my house. Instead I get people trying to steal my packages.📦

I've reported this type of stuff to Amazon on several occasions about many different products

Often I order stuff from Amazon and it comes with a card that offers a reward in return for a review. Then they ask you to screenshot the review and email it to them--but also not to photograph the card. Any mention of these cards will get you banned from reviewing things on Amazon, as well. So, what you get are people who give great reviews in order to get the free product. And they don't even get the free product.

Arun's so good at this 🤣. The way he spills the truth about the scandals and lies by the companies! just inspires other creators to step out and do the same. Soon, the tech community will become independent from the influence of such companies on their content.

About a month or two ago i bought some dirt cheap ear-pods through Amazon. Even for the price they were terrible, so i wrote an Amazon review saying so. I also commented that it was odd that all of the other reviews read exactly like marketing talk, with bullet points nailed one after the other. A lot of people seemed to take the time to write (often at great length) exactly everything that you would want the perfect ear-pods to be. And you know the saying, if something sounds to good to be true, it usually is. And you can't really expect £17 ear-pods to be THAT good, can you? Amazon refused to post my original review because, apparently, you are not allowed to comment on other reviews in yours. But within a week i received a postcard from the company selling the ear-pods saying that if i changed my review to a five star one, and e-mailed them a link to prove it, then they would give me a £20 Amazon voucher (which is £3 more than the ear-pods cost!) This postcard was also very clear about NOT mentioning this arrangement (obvs), or including a photo of the postcard with all of this on. So me being me, i instantly wrote another review mentioning all of this, and included photos of all of this scheming bribery with the important lines even highlighted in pen. I value my self respect more than twenty damn quid thanks! Anyway, i don't think TrustPilot can be counted on much either. I left dozens of genuine reviews on there (a roughly 50/50 mix of good and bad), and about three quarters were flagged as fake and taken down. I got the impression (though i have no evidence to back this up) that the biggest companies have a say in how many bad reviews get taken seriously, and positive reviews for smaller (rival) firms get dismissed as fake.

I’m actually thinking about ending my Amazon prime membership after having it for a few years. The hassle of trying to figure out if a product is actually good before buying it has deterred me from using the site now. Might as well stick to shopping directly on company sites nowadays as looking at reviews doesn’t really help me anymore.

i recently purchased a phone mount for my car. a few days after the package arrived, i got a little card in the mail saying that the seller would give me a $20 amazon gift card if i left a good review i’m not always the brightest, but i decided there wasn’t much of a risk in trying because all they asked for was the tracking number of my order and a screenshot of my review. They did actually send a real gift card that i bought a few things with, but i’m a little paranoid now after seeing this video

Appreciate the effort and the amount of research put into this video. Enjoyed this video. Great job buddy!

I love the part of the video where Surfshark helps with Arun's safety, not letting his address known to any seller to send any toys that he might be too interested in, giving us this amazing masterpiece ♥️

Great video ! And yes.. there's just too much fake reviews, even fake comments (hello Twitter) and it's just that easy to believe whatever we read if we don't take the time to check if the account from which the comment comes from is fake or not

It would be amazing if I could go to physical location where I could look at products, experience the product before I buy, and ask friends in my neighborhood what they think.

4:16 That guy is a Bengali guy ... I can bet about that Its bengali assent

Even without paid reviews, people post their opinions on Amazon without buying the products and that also include among reviews. Like how people say this product is overpriced which immediately tell you they didn't buy the product but it bring down the rating.

This is called a "Brushing Scam." People use your account information and address to promote their product. This is happening on several platforms, not just Amazon.

11:54 -- This might be why when I went to Amazon last year (trying to buy several additional USB charger plug bricks that I really liked) the specific item I wanted was no longer on that page. It's not that the page no longer existed, it's just that the page no longer had that item at all, but instead had a few unrelated electronics from the same seller. I even clicked on the item from my purchase history to make sure I would be getting the exact same thing. At the time I was just disappointed that they no longer had that specific item, and assumed it was no longer in production. But now I'm wondering if it was one of the fraudulent moves you described here, where they were farming for good reviews, and then later pretended those reviews were about a more expensive item.

Love your videos!! Thank you for doing the hard work and giving us the information

There are actually full Facebook Groups for this. It's insane. People ask you to buy the product, then after you leave a review, they PayPal you back the $. Its insane.

On July 1 I ordered a sunscreen stick from a company called MI’DING and they said the package will com by July 16(bc we will go on vacation) and we r at VACAY and now it says the seller left A-n market so 20$ just got thrown into trash 😢😢

This is an awesome video! You got super investigative. Also, I can’t lie the best part of this video is your “prime-mate” joke. I actually laughed aloud.

Absolutely love your investigative journalism style videos!

Something else that wasn’t mentioned about Fakespot is that its AI registers all Vine Voice reviews as unreliable. If a listing has too many of them compared to normal reviews, it automatically gives the listing an F.

I mean my two cents when buying something on the more expensive end is either cross checking with Reddit posts/reviews on the product or just going with actual brands. Say for USB cables, Anker, Ugreen, Rankie, etc. than some generic cable that doesn't even have the brand in the title.

So glad someone with a big influence is covering this - this needs more attention!

When the lace on your hoodie got stuck in your hood it annoyed me sm😂 13:48

I was looking for an above ground pool this week and noticed on one listing that the reviews mentioned the old price and that a ladder, filter, and other items came with it. The pool was now like 2 or 3x that price and no longer came with the additional items but still had all these glowing reviews about the value, etc. Huge red flag.

I had a purchase review removed because I didn't receive part of my review. I gave them a 3 or 4 star review. The only negative I had was that I hadn't gotten the case with the purchase (that I bought).

bro legit said " *I* don't work " on that gaming console review 💀💀

This started happening to me with Uber Eats. I started receiving orders that i've never made, it wasn't on my order list nor was i charged so there was no proof of "scam". Trying to explain the potential security issue with the uber support via messages was impossible. I ended up canceling my Uber account because i don't trust them with my credit card anymore.

Wait so if the products were legit, and it wasn't because of a data leak or fake reviews, that means these foam shooters legitimately got a 4.9 star rating?

My usual principle is that I only look at the reviews with photos or videos of the product. Those are usually pretty in depth and helpful, and you can also use the photos to gague if the actual product lines up with the listing.

Arun’s content always makes me entertained, and this video was great to learn about review sellers. Keep up the good work, Arun.