Customer reviews on Amazon are a core part of why customers love shopping in our stores. Ever since Amazon introduced customer reviews in 1995, we have continued to innovate upon review features that help shoppers easily see and share positive and negative customer feedback that is relevant, helpful, and trustworthy. Last year, 125 million customers contributed nearly 1.5 billion reviews and ratings to our stores, providing future Amazon shoppers with transparent insights into the products they were considering.

Amazon will continue to hold bad actors accountable to protect our customers and selling partners. However, these high-volume fake review brokers are a global problem, impacting customer reviews across multiple industry sectors. The private sector, consumer groups, and governments need to work together to stop these fake review brokers and send a clear message that this illicit activity must stop.

Based on what we have learned from our proactive efforts, partnership with others, and enforcement actions, we support greater collaboration across the private and public sector to pursue the following steps and stop fake reviews:

1. Greater information sharing about known bad actors: Fake review brokers are a global issue affecting different industries, and we welcome opportunities to share information about these known bad actors with consumer groups and industry partners around the world. Through cross-industry sharing--including information on bad actors' tactics and techniques, who they are targeting, the services they provide, and how they operate--we can more effectively shut down these schemes, thereby protecting more consumers across different industries.

We are committed to ensuring our reviews remain a trustworthy, insightful resource for customers. Amazon will continue to protect our stores from fake reviews by investing in proactive tools to detect and stop fake reviews from impacting a customer's buying decision. We will also continue taking legal action against fake review brokers. However, we cannot win this fight alone. Only through partnerships with like-minded stakeholders across the private and public sector can we truly stop fake review brokers, address the problem at the source, and help ensure that reviews are trustworthy across the industry.