Some Amazon employees are reportedly accepting cash bribes from online sellers to delete negative product reviews

Authored by businessinsider.com and submitted by interestedin86
image for Some Amazon employees are reportedly accepting cash bribes from online sellers to delete negative product reviews

For Amazon's online sellers, a negative product review can be extremely damaging to businesses selling their products on the retail giant's site.

In order to quash bad feedback, some sellers are offering Amazon employees bribes to obtain bad reviewers' email addresses or to erase the negative review from the site entirely, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

According to the Wall Street Journal's sources, this practice is especially common in China, where small business owners sometimes pay Amazon employees around $300 for each bad review they take down.

These services are reportedly overseen by brokers who use the Chinese messaging service WeChat to connect sellers with Amazon employees.

Sellers can even contact brokers to get proprietary information on sales volume and data relating to shoppers' online spending habits in order to boost sales, the sources said.

Amazon policies prohibit disclosing this information, and the online retail giant has reportedly launched an internal investigation to determine which employees are violating the company's policies.

Amazon didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

dg_hj25 on September 17th, 2018 at 01:15 UTC »

I was looking at headphones not long ago. While reading the reviews for one product, the reviews were 4+ stars. All the reviews were copy and paste, or along the same wording saying the headphones were so amazing. This was 50+ comments! Does one report this to amazon for spamming or what?

hypnogoad on September 17th, 2018 at 00:12 UTC »

Not surprising. As a consumer, I've been offered bribes (in the form of free products) to remove or edit my bad reviews. One company won't leave me the fuck alone, it's been almost a year and I still get monthly emails from them.

MildlyRetardedGoat on September 17th, 2018 at 00:11 UTC »

I knew something was up. I order at least 5 packages a week and I rely heavily on customer reviews. Up until this year I was 100% satisfied with every one of my purchases. This year alone I had to send back at least 6 orders that were rated 4 stars because they were absolute garbage. Amazon is turning into wish right before our eyes.