Do you shop online? If you do, you probably rely on customer reviews to help you vet the quality and reliability of a product, and the company selling the product. However, those reviews are being gamed in a number of ways!

I’ve always known that some reviews are fake. Click on a profile of a reviewer and you see that they have recommended 15 products. Check those reviews out and it turns out that most of them are for the same product under different listings. Does that person really need 12-15 of the same product when you need only one? Are they buying, for example, 14 Bluetooth headphones and rotating through them daily for 2 weeks, then reviewing each one, but only bothering to do that for this one product? Unlikely.

However, I just came across an entire product line search on Amazon where the vast majority of products, iPhone headphone jacks, didn’t only have fake reviews, the items being sold had reviews for completely different products!

What made this worse was that some of these were ‘sponsored’ and one of them was marked ‘Amazon’s Choice’.

Looking at the first 8 reviews on display for this product, 7 of them are high ratings for a computer hard drive, and the one actual review for the product was a 1-star review saying the product stopped working after a couple weeks.

I don’t always go to the reviews when I see high star ratings by many reviewers, but the price seemed way too low to be good. This is definitely a case of buyer beware! The scammers are gaming Amazon, and I’m sure they are gaming other sites as well… don’t get ‘star struck’ and be sure to read a few of the reviews.