Call it a bug zapper, not a feature.

Data from Fakespot, a Mozilla-owned service that helps consumers spot fake reviews and scams on shopping sites, shows a bizarre increase in the number of bug zapper listings on Amazon over the past three years. At the same time, Fakespot saw an increase in the number of negative or unreliable reviews for this product category.

Saoud Khalifah, founder and director of Fakespot at Mozilla, says bug zappers are just one example of the convergence of recent e-commerce trends: a growing number of third-party seller listings on Amazon.com, more merchants searching for sale at a low price. products with high margins and generative AI tools that make it easier for sellers to produce questionable marketing copy and reviews.

“Right now, everyone has a different view of what ‘fake’ means,” says Khalifah. “In the books category, for example, you might see an author asking friends and family to leave reviews and some people might view that as disingenuous. But when you look at this particular category, bug zappers, it’s game over territory. It is one of the favorite products of fraudulent selling farms.

Khalifah says bug zappers are one of the few hardware product categories Fakespot has reviewed on Amazon recently, as they’ve seen an increase in both product listings and unreliable reviews. The bug zapper listings reviewed aren’t necessarily blatant scams (buyers still receive a real bug zapper), but Fakespot’s analysis says that negative reviews indicate that some products don’t appear to work as advertised.

Among the less than complimentary reviews, buyers often complain that a bug zapper is just a bright light with no real insect killing ability. Fakespot also found erroneous reviews of different products placed among bug zapper reviews. A bug zapper received hundreds of reviews, but most were about a capacitor motor fan; another bug zapper list contained reviews of pens and paper goods.

Amazon spokesperson Maria Boschetti said in a statement that shopping on Amazon is “safe, authentic and trustworthy.” She added that her store carries a wide selection of items and perspectives and has strong policies and guidelines. “Our technology continually analyzes the compliance of all products on sale, and if we discover that a product has not been detected by our checks, we immediately remove it and refine our checks,” she said.

This week, Amazon released a new brand protection report, in which the company says it invested more than $1.2 billion in brand protection last year and employed more than 15,000 people who have dedicated themselves to thwarting counterfeits, fraud and other forms of abuse in its store. . The company says it analyzes billions of attempts to edit product pages daily for signs of abuse.

The report acknowledges that the number of products in the Amazon store continues to increase, making brand safety management more complex, but says tools such as image recognition and counterfeit detection technology make it possible to identify inauthentic or counterfeit products. Amazon also works with cross-border law enforcement, including law enforcement in China, the company says, to identify and seize counterfeit products.

Strangely similar

Fakespot uses machine learning to analyze product details and product reviews on e-commerce sites, then typically assigns a “trustworthiness rating” based on the signals it has picked up. It might, for example, give a product listing a “D” rating and say this analysis suggests that “68% of reviews are trustworthy” but “the quality of review content is low.” It also sometimes displays its own rating so a buyer can compare it with the rating on Amazon. A product rated four stars by Amazon might only get two stars by Fakespot.

The Fakespot tool has been criticized in the past for what some see as ambiguity around its methods and for its potential to unfairly label legitimate sellers. Amazon successfully pressured Apple to remove Fakespot from the App Store three years ago, alleging that it provided misleading information. Fakespot has since been re-admitted to the App Store under the names Fakespot Pro Browser and Fakespot Lite.