Counterfeits and fake reviews may not seem like a customer experience problem at first glance.
But letting fake products and bogus reviews run rampant across a site, especially for a retailer like Amazon, is a recipe for a customer experience disaster.
Amazon isn’t sitting on its haunches. It’s taking a four-pronged approach to stopping bad actors from taking advantage of customers, including proactive controls, empowering brands, taking the fight to counterfeiters and fake review brokers via legal actions, and educating consumers.
“At Amazon, we have a North Star mission of being the world's most customer-centric store,” Kebharu Smith, director of Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit, told CX Dive. To stay true to that, customers need to be confident in the authenticity of the products they purchase and know that Amazon is doing all that it can to protect them from counterfeits and fake reviews.
Counterfeit goods and fake reviews erode trust.
Trust can cement customer loyalty, while its absence can repel customers and drive negative word-of-mouth, according to Jon Picoult, founder and principal of Watermark Consulting. Counterfeits and fake reviews are particularly noxious for Amazon because trust and reliability are central to its brand promise.
“People flock to Amazon because they trust that they’re going to get the best deal on an item, because they trust that when Amazon says it’ll arrive at your doorstep tomorrow, it actually does,” Picoult said. “Counterfeit goods and fake reviews chip away at that trust, and that can sow doubt in the customer’s mind, impacting their future repurchase and referral behavior.”
It’s up to retailers and marketplaces to protect customers, according to Jon Copestake, global lead retail analyst at EY Insights.
“It isn’t just incumbent on them to combat counterfeits and fake reviews, it’s existential for their long-term business model,” Copestake said in an email. “If a consumer doesn’t trust the authenticity of buying in an established online platform, then they will either buy from sources they do trust, such as directly from the brand, or revert to the cheapest option they can find, regardless of whether it is counterfeit or not.”
Identifying counterfeiters and fake review brokers
Reviews have been a cornerstone of Amazon’s business since 1995, when Amazon first introduced the feature on its site.
Reviews provide consumers confidence in their purchases, and have become a regular part of the research process, especially for holiday gift-shopping. More than 4 in 5 holiday shoppers read reviews before purchasing items, a Mastercard survey found.
Amazon, in fact, encourages consumers to read reviews before purchasing to ensure a product’s authenticity.
The “social proof” accorded by Amazon’s online reviews is especially meaningful, Picoult says. As consumers can’t directly inspect a product as they would in a brick-and-mortar store, they use online reviews as a seemingly trusted proxy.
Counterfeit goods are a longstanding, expensive problem, accounting for an estimated $467 billion in global trade in 2021 alone, according to a 2025 OECD–EUIPO report. Not only does it impact brands that sell on Amazon, but consumers who were looking to get one product but get a faulty or fake one, blame not just the brand but Amazon.
“We have effectively an army of people who are making sure that fraud can’t exist in our store,” Smith said. “These are often data scientists, machine learning analysts, investigators and lawyers like myself, who are building the most robust tools, whether it's AIs or large language models.”
While fraud has long posed a problem, the challenge is one of scale, control and accountability.
“The ability of generative AI to rapidly generate fake reviews on established websites and the proliferation of online sales platforms, often set up in less regulated offshore legal jurisdictions, is making it difficult to track and authenticate genuine products and content,” Copestake said.
Amazon is trying to stay a step ahead. The retailer uses LLMs to scan billions of reviews every day searching for suspect listings and fraudulent accounts and looking at such data points as IP addresses and banking information to determine.
“We've been able to stop any counterfeit listings, 99% of them before they ever make it in our store in the first place, before a brand even needs to bring it to our attention,” Smith said. “And the same is going on with our reviews of use. We have large language models and tools that are helping us protect our store from fake reviews.”
Amazon is a member of the Coalition for Trusted Reviews, along with such organizations as the Better Business Bureau, Glassdoor and Tripadvisor. Founded in 2023, the cross-industry group collaborates and shares information on bad actors’ tactics in an effort to safeguard review integrity.
Such partnerships also result in legal action. In October, Amazon and the Better Business Bureau teamed up in a second joint lawsuit against the operators of Skitsolutionbd.com, whom the two allege sell fake reviews and fraudulent content targeting both Amazon's stores and the Better Business Bureau business profiles.
Taking the fight to bad actors
Five years ago, Amazon launched the Counterfeit Crimes Unit. Its charge: to take the fight to bad actors that evade Amazon’s proactive controls.
In the five years that CCU has been around, it’s pursued over 24,000 bad actors globally via civil suits and criminal actions, filed over 200 civil actions against bad actors last year alone, and identified and disposed of over 15 million counterfeit products, according to Smith.
The team spans 12 countries and partners with local law enforcement, from the United Kingdom to China.
China is the dominant source of counterfeit goods, accounting for 45% of all reported seizures in 2021, the OECD–EUIPO report found.
“We're going to make sure that we have our reputation stand and that we are the safest and most reliable store for our customers, and that we're doing everything we can to go after these bad actors, and that we're holding them accountable aggressively, and that we're messaging what we're doing as a deterrent,” Smith said.
