AMAZON Sues 1114 FIVERR Sellers

[anigrams]

I have no problem with humor. Humorous commercials are my business. What I do take to task is Fakery and Lies whether they are humorous or straight when I need a real review on a product in order to make an informed purchase decision. I doubt the guy in the top VEET Hair Removal review was even remotely telling the truth when he said “the first thing I did was ignore the warning and smear this all over my knob and bollocks.” Shocking and Funny as creative writing, maybe. Truthful and useful as a real review, absolutely not.

[misscrystal]

Some people may have laughed when they read that so I don’t see it as a serious issue.

[babajee]

because a Magazine, ‘SUN Magazine’ did an ‘expose’ on them, using fake reviews, they were able to catapult their fake pathetic book to #1… Amazon is saving face.
People who NEVER EVEN SOLD (or gave) 1 review (but listed it as a gig have also been SUED. lols

And what about the hundreds of other websites still selling them? lols

[googfather]

Amazon themselves started posting fake reviews way before fiverr even existed. They have a review program where they give out free products to registered reviewers in exchange of reviews… This is exactly the same as paying someone to review a product on fiverr or elsewhere

[googfather]

And most of amazon’s in house reviewers are biased towards the product

[fastcopywriter]

I had no idea, thanks for that tip. Is that program still on? I’d love to get free products.

[misscrystal]

Readers usually have an ability to discern the real reviews and can ignore the fake or biased ones. It would be a big task to try to censure reviews based on truthfulness.

[jayphotoshop]

That’s bad…But let’s be realistic almost any site have fake reviews. I mean seriously… When you start an website where you sell stuffs you need good reviews if you want to sell…

[alexdayle]

The buzz in the town that this case is a much bigger case and is much larger in scope than Amazon Fake Reviews. Maybe FTC, maybe Sellers threatening buyers, Negative SEO …Its all coming to a head.

[anigrams]

And often less!

[sincere18]

But it’s not honest if they weren’t buying the book on their own to begin with. It’s still a paid review. Even if they don’t give it 5 stars the number of reviews a book has is a factor unto itself.

[mariokluser]

Actually I’m glad to hear that. It also was on the news in the Netherlands. The whole thing isn’t good for the reputation of Fiverr here. People who know that I have gigs here but never heard of Fiverr before asked me: ‘Aren’t you also working with this scam site?’

You see, you have just one chance to make a positive first impression.

Just as I said in an earlier topic on all the copyright and portaitright infringements here: it is important that Fiverr monitors these gigs well. Especially when it comes to the obvious violations.

I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t stop with Amazon suing the sellers of fake reviews. It’s very likely that this is the start of an avalanche of legal cases for illegal behavior.

[fonthaunt]

radiantrabbit I just saw your post. No offense to anyone advising here, but to be on the safest side, I wouldn’t get legal advice on an anonymous forum no matter your country.

[isolem]

I agree. As an author, I am appalled at anyone who tries to scam people into buying their work by having fake reviews posted. If your work isn’t good enough to garner reviews organically, take the hint and publish higher quality work.

[anigrams]

Fiverr should also be more preemptive with the “animators” stealing the intellectual properties from VIDEOHIVE creators.

Burying their heads in the sand and allowing a free run on obvious copyright infringement is effectively collusion… possibly even criminal?

[frank_d]

You said it @anigrams.

Over 80% of animation and intro gigs are straight up VH templates being resold with no permission, license. It’s straight up illegal.

They just torrent a bunch of templates and then sell them, by advertising them as their own design.

It always struck me as odd how VH never did anything about it.

[wordsbypeggy]

Years ago, I worked for a newspaper and got paid to read books and write reviews of them. There are still people out there who work for magazines and newspapers, today, doing the same thing. Almost always, the publisher or author sends a free copy of the book to the magazine, newspaper, or trade journal for it to be reviewed, along with the book is usually a “thank you in advance”. This thank you might be tickets to an event, a gift certificate, you name it. The most well known the author, the bigger the thank you. These “tips” are, of course, intended to entice a positive review. Almost every one of the books publishers and/or authors send out for review are available via the same company that is suing Fiverr sellers. Kind of makes me wonder if these guys intend to sue every book publisher out there because they all seek out reviews and pay for them, directly or indirectly.
What this suit is going to do, I think, is make the common customer refuse to post good reviews of stuff they purchase and just post the really bad reviews, if any at all.

[fastcopywriter]

That’s a great point. I’m curious, did you ever get punished for writing negative reviews?

[misscrystal]

As long as it is not widely known it’s ok apparently.

[mariokluser]

If you live outside of the States Amazon pays you when you reach $100,-. Google pays a fair amount of food what’s on my plate.

[mariokluser]

His profile has been removed already, lol.

[wordsbypeggy]

Yes, many times, my editor would refuse to publish a review that was not singing the praises of a specific book. When that happened, I would not get paid for my work. At the time, I was getting paid by the published word.

[wordsbypeggy]

It’s been around since the early days of journalism. You would think that a company such as this would have a highly educated team of consultants that would know that.

[philtabest]

It’s about appearances more than anything, people search the Amazon reviews for guidance. They have always known that people would abuse the reviewing system in order to keep up appearances, but they don’t want all their buyers to know this.

They want to give their buyers the illusion that they care and that they’re trying to put a stop to it. This means that anyone “Publicly” offering reviewing services for profit may be stung.

If however they said, fake reviews, we’ve known about this for years and simply don’t care because we make money. Then people would slowly stop using Amazon and go back to the high street stores.

[Guest createsolution]

Couldn’t agree more! My opinion, exactly. A Game of Appearances.