Leading accessories manufacturer Aukey was banned from Amazon following a massive data breach; Tomtop and Mpow were also involved in the scheme

A report uncovered by SafetyDetectives found direct messages between Amazon vendors and customers where positive reviews were exchanged for free products When a product is loaded with positive reviews, it naturally appears higher on Amazon's product page, increasing sales and thus legitimate reviews

Editor's note: A representative of Aukey made the following statement to Tom's Guide regarding this matter, but did not address the truth of the allegations

In a statement to Tom's Guide, an Aukey representative said, "I do not know the details of what happened either We are currently working on a solution At this time, the company has not been significantly affected and daily operations are continuing as normal"

DigitalTrends reports that Aukey, Tomtop, and Mpow products have been completely removed by Amazon; if you try to click on the link for the Aukey EP-T27 earphones, you get an empty Amazon page with "sorry" at the top and a picture of a dog appears

As of this writing, the Mpow storefront appears to still be live on Amazon, but all of its products are listed as "currently unavailable"

It is unclear if other brands have been affected

As SafetyDetectives details, accessory manufacturers work with third parties to let potential reviewers know which products need to add 5 stars People then purchase the products on their personal accounts and leave 5-star reviews The reviewer then sends a message to the vendor with a link to their Amazon profile and PayPal information The reviewer receives a refund through PayPal and the reviewed product is kept as payment or compensation

According to SafetyDetectives, they have discovered all 75K accounts that may have been used to post fraudulent reviews A total of 232,664 Gmail accounts were found on the compromised and unencrypted ElasticSearch server, some of which were potentially personally identifiable The server was located in China, but included users in the United States and Europe This server has since been protected

SafetyDetectives speculates that the server was owned by a third party that was acting in concert with Aukey and other sellers to round up potential reviewers

Interestingly, SafetyDetectives found that reviewers must adhere to certain standards These include waiting several days before posting a review, having a certain word count, and sometimes even posting video reviews, etc SafetyDetectives also made this third party appear legitimate when approaching potential reviewers with this scheme, We also discovered that they use professional-sounding language Of course, this third party did not point out that writing fake reviews for compensation could at least violate Amazon's terms of service

Some Twitter users have begun posting images of coercive messages by Aukey asking people to submit "honest reviews" in order to earn rewards Tom's Guide has not independently verified these claims

Clearly, brands like Aukey are already feeling the wrath of Amazon for allegedly breaking its rules It is unclear if any of the banned vendors will be allowed back in, or if individuals will also have their accounts suspended

However, fake reviews on Amazon are nothing new It has been a longstanding problem at the giant retailer, as publishing fake reviews has become a cottage industry Fortunately, there are browser extensions such as Fakespot that help buyers filter out illegal reviews