A few days ago SafetyDetectives uncovered a case of positive reviews on Amazon, in which some companies offered their products for free in exchange for false positive reviews. One of the manufacturers that were part of this plot is Aukey, one of the manufacturers of accessories for Apple products that offered the best value for money. Other manufacturers like Victsing, MPow and Tacklife could also be affected by this plot of false positive reviews, but for the moment they are still available on Amazon.
According to SafetyDetectives, people who provided false positive reviews, bought the products on Amazon and a few days after sending a screenshot with the positive review they had published, they received the amount of the product they had purchased to their PayPal account.
The details of this network have been uncovered after a data breach that revealed more than 13 million records equivalent to about 7 GB that were exposed on the ElasticSearch server without any encryption or password. In the messages that have been filtered in these logs, you will find the personal data of people who wrote faulty reviews, along with your PayPal address plus all sellers who use this Amazon-penalized malpractice.
Manufacturers contacted potential product reviewers asking if they wanted to join the tester reward program in exchange for a positive review. They use professional language to not arouse any suspicions among customers and thus prevent them from contacting Amazon.
If you currently search for Aukey on Amazon, you will see how all your products have been recalled. Also, the store they had on Amazon is also not available. The last bet of this manufacturer for the Apple ecosystem was a series of chargers compatible with MagSafe technology, although they did not have Apple certification.
What will happen to all the customers who have bought any of your products?
Most likely, Amazon takes over and proceeds to return the amount of the purchases when any of its products stop working, as long as it is under warranty. And I say this knowingly. After a year and a half of buying a headset for my son, they stopped working. I contacted Amazon and they told me that since the manufacturer had stopped selling through Amazon, they couldn't send me a new unit, so they proceeded to refund the money I had paid for the headphones.
