"Yarase Review" Real October 1 15:47
In online shopping, the “review” that consumers rely on to purchase products is being manipulated illegally. “Yarase Review” is spreading, such as adding top rated ★ 5 and highly rated comments without using products. There are also many unnatural reviews in Japanese that just copy and paste explanations and translation software. We approach the mechanism. (The darkness of online advertising and review review team)
“Review” written in imagination
“Reducing stress when running. It ’s solid, so you do n’t have to worry about getting off.”
Review of the armband that secures your smartphone to your arm while running.
Actually, it is a complete creation.
I was able to talk to a man in his 30s office worker in Fukuoka who wrote this review.
When I visited my house, the man showed me an armband product that was not opened at all.
“I didn't use it because it was n’t open. I did n’t go to the gym. I wanted to feel like I used it.
The man says that he has written such lie reviews and harassment reviews for about 60 items such as smartphone films, USB cables, and game equipment. The text was taken from other reviews of similar products or created in a fictional story.
The making mechanism is
Why are you writing a review?
That's because you get rewards.
The opportunity came when I was looking for a side job online.
I knew that a SNS group was looking for a review writer.
If you bought a product specified by a merchant on Amazon and wrote a highly rated review, you would get a reward of several hundred yen per review after refunding the purchase price of the product.
It was a technique called “0 yen resale”.
When a man purchases a product, writes a review of the product that has been sent, and then sends the content of the review to the merchant, the purchase price and reward for the product have been sent over the Internet. All procedures are online.
The product after the review was written was resold with a flea market app, so far, it had profited about 60,000 yen. The man said that he wasn't going now because the trouble of reselling became increasingly cumbersome.
“I thought it was a revolutionary way that I had never imagined if I could buy it for zero yen and sell it. There are some housewives who know more than 200,000 yen a month that they know. "
Manual is SNS
A man who lives in Ibaraki Prefecture who says that he has earned about 200,000 yen a month in a similar manner, has revealed that something like a manual for making a review is sold on SNS. The man is said to have purchased for 30,000 yen.
There, ▼ how to write reviews, refer to the wording written in the product summary column, ▼ know-how such as 5 stars (evaluation), the length of the review is about 5 lines In addition, ▼ not to write a large number of reviews at once, ▼ to use multiple accounts created by changing the name and address, and how to prevent the account from being closed by Amazon.
“At first, I started without knowing anything, but if I did this, I could easily resell. The first 30,000 yen I paid was immediately available.”
There is no guilt ...
The man talked about the “business” of harassment reviews:
“Since we are purchasing for zero yen, the price we sell will be profitable, so we are only thinking about selling it anyway. We don't have to pay for it, but we can get the money. Even if it ’s closed, you ’ll just need to recreate it.The amount of money that comes in is not so much compared to the investment, but it ’s a “no risk middle return”. ”
As the man says, “Yarase Review” is different from the original review.
Writing itself can also fool other consumers.
Is there no guilt?
The man said, “There is a perception that he is doing something like cherry,” and continued as follows.
“It's normal for companies to get products for free, so it ’s suspicious whether they ’re writing the real thing. Use it, write a lie, write it without it, or just the difference. If you look at it for a moment, you'll know immediately whether it's a suspicious product.
Recruitment of reviews over the internet
Recruitment of such harassment reviews can be easily found on the Internet.
Among them, the Facebook group is actively communicating.
Mainly, images of products were posted daily to private groups that could not see posts unless they became members, and members were invited to purchase products and write reviews.
In fact, even as we confirmed in August, there were more than 20 of these review groups on Facebook, and we could actually see the posts.
Some groups had more than 30,000 members participating.
Looking at the organizers of these groups and the people who contributed mainly, many Chinese-style names using simplified characters and other Chinese characters were found in addition to Japanese names.
Amazon is prohibited by law and legal regulations
Are these harassment reviews legally correct?
Amazon has a customer review guideline that prohibits reviews written for the purpose of receiving money, etc., and removes them from the site.
On the other hand, there are no laws in place to crack down on the review review itself.
However, the Consumer Affairs Agency, among the considerations in the guideline of the prize display method, the company asks the agency to write a large number of reviews and change the evaluation on the site to display it as a popular product In such cases, there is a possibility of violating the prize display law.
Self-defense means
What can consumers do to avoid being fooled by these harassment reviews? There are also tools to help you identify reviews.
A site called “Sakura Checker” was released in July.
When the URL of the product is entered, “Sakura degree” is displayed in%.
What are the key points to seeing you?
The site was developed by Yu, 40, who works as an IT engineer.
I asked Yuu about the points to distinguish suspicious reviews.
▼ First, the number of days and stars that were reviewed.
One wireless earphone review had about 200 reviews out of about 600 reviews on the first day of July 18, most of which were rated 5 stars.
Before and after that, there were 0 reviews, and the distribution was clearly abnormal.
It is highly possible that the merchant has written a large amount in some way.
▼ Furthermore, unnatural sentences.
One earphone review says "I put it on my ears".
There is a possibility that foreign people write using translation software.
There are also cases where reviews of unrelated products are written, or exactly the same text is written on different days with different account names.
“Sakura Checker” has its own unconventional texts, evaluation biases, date biases, as well as the history of the person who wrote the review and how the product names are in violation of Amazon ’s terms. Establishing a standard to determine the “Sakura degree”. 100,000 products have been analyzed so far. Of these, approximately 17,000 items were judged to have a cherry degree exceeding 60%, accounting for 16% of the total.
Same text in different colors ...
I got advice from Yuu, and when I checked the reviews of Amazon in the Toruji team, I found strange reviews one after another.
According to officials, reviews in Amazon can, in principle, be written only once for each item purchased, but on one wireless earphone, the exact same sentence was posted over and over for each different color.
At the end of August, there were about 630 reviews. Of these, 97 sets of reviews with almost the same text were found with only different colors.
On the other hand, products with extremely increasing or decreasing number of reviews were also found.
One gaming chair product increased to over 600 in just two weeks after the number of reviews that had been over 1500 in July dropped to about 110 in mid-August.
This is probably because the Amazon side detected and deleted fraudulent reviews, and then the vendors wrote reviews on a large scale.
The online shopping platform is
Kengo Tanaka, CEO of “GROOVE”, a former Amazon Japan employee who consults online shopping, points out that the online shopping platform needs to consider how to provide reviews and product information.
“For Amazon, customer reviews have played a very important role in business strategy. Amazon originally provided fair information to its customers by ensuring that not only good reviews but all bad reviews were seen. However, in contrast to the original idea, there is a current situation in which harassment reviews are conspicuous. We should leave the decision, including the authenticity of the review, to the customer and change the purchase decision-making mechanism as much as possible, and Amazon has taken measures such as deleting suspicious reviews. However, the tricks of malicious vendors are becoming more clever and I expect them to become addicted. ''
“It's the responsibility of the platformer to think about how to make a new product purchase decision to help customers determine whether it ’s a good product, and the sellers also improve I think we should continue. "