Richard Monson-Haefel's Blog

Amazon.com reviews are a farce.

When a book is sold on Amazon.com anyone can post a review about it whether they read it or not. All you need to do is create an account on Yahoo or HotMail and then create a new Amazon.com account with that e-mail address. You can be a Fred Smith, Barney Rubble, or anyone you want - you can even impersonate someone. Amazon.com doesn't seem to care. It's a prefect set up for fraud, and for people with no scruples it represents a simple way to pump up their own ratings while knocking down their competitors.

More recently, I've become aware that some individuals have gone a step further by posting fake five-star reviews on their own books using the names of famous people in our industry. If you think that's stupid, let me assure it happens. In fact, I found one book that had at least one (probably three) reviews impersonating well known figures in our industry. How do I know they were fakes? I asked the people I suspected were being impersonated. I myself was impersonated on Amazon.com in a slightly different manner.

A couple months ago I discovered two book recommendation lists that were posted under the name "Richard Monson-Haefel" on Amazon.com's Listmania page. One was called "Great Books on Web Services" and the other was "Books I wish I had Written". Both lists had one of my competitors book at the top, so that it became the icon for the list itself. I didn't post these lists, someone else impersonated me and posted them in some stupid attempt to influence readers - like people care what I like and don't like (why are you reading this anyway?). What really pissed me off was the fact that I was impersonated. There are only four people with the last name Monson-Haefel on this planet and that is my wife, two kids, and myself. Why so unique? My wife and I took each others names when we got married. She was a Haefel (a rare name) and I was a Monson. Monson-Haefel is a married name. That listmania posting under my name was intention fraud, and in many states its considered Identity Theft - a crime.

As a side note, James Gosling was also impersonated on Listmania � funny how his list recommended the same book as mine �. Hmmmm.

Amazon.com wields a huge amount of influence in the publishing industry. By some accounts 25% of all books (at least in our field) are sold by Amazon.com. That's incredible market share. Because Amazon.com doesn't verify the identity of their members it's has unwittingly created an environment that encourages fraud and identify theft. What can we do? Well, other than complain to Amazon.com maybe not much. If anyone feels the same way that I do, and you have a good idea of how to stop Amazon.com's current business practices let me know. I'm all ears.

Personally, I think the best solution is for Amazon.com to validate the identity of its members by credit card. Why? Well, unless you have connections in the underworld it's pretty hard to create more than one Amazon.com account because each identity would be associated with a valid credit card with a unique owner. It would pretty simple to determine that two members are the same person - even if they used different credit cards (e.g Visa and MasterCard) for each account. What would be even better is if Amazon.com only allowed people who purchased the book from Amazon.com to post a review about that book. This would make it pretty expensive to post multiple reviews to the same book, good or bad.

Richard

Comments

• Fake Amazon.com reviews; hardly new news...
  I read and use the reviews. I never pay any attention to the names of the authors. As with any review I pay attention to the intelligence of it. Does it look at the book in the way that I would and does it seem to ask and answer the questions I have about the book. I've bought books in a number of diverse fields and I've found that I've rarely bought a book where I feel I've been misled by reviews. But I do read them critically. Perhaps that's the difference.

  However I can certainly see where someone would be pissed to find themselves impersonated. But my answer to that, and it's probably simplistic, would be for Amazon to just say that anyone impersonating anyone else is subject to legal actions. What they would be I don't know. I'm sure I'd want more stringent authentication mechanisms if I found my good name being misused.

  But I do think that's a separate, though related, problem. The reviews can be very useful, especially if you read them critically. Furthermore I often find them superior to published reviews in better known media. And I don't think that this is surprising. There are of course plenty of junk reviews on Amazon but there are also passionate reviews by people who care about the subject matter. Gauging the passion of Amazon reviews versus more established media reviews I find that Amazon often wins. This may seem sacrilegious to some but I think it just proves the fact that book-reviewing is not a high paying job and that many people who do review in more established media do it as much for money or prestige as for actual interest in the subject. The reviews often read like something done as part of a job. They often lack the freshness that the best Amazon reviews have.

  Many years ago I read an article from the 1800s I think about art reviews. The person suggested that the opinions of "ignorARTS" were often quite valuable, partially because they come from someone outside the established culture. I think it's the same with Amazon. We should be happy we can get some fresh reviews of books.

  Posted by: kenjanuski on November 17, 2003 at 10:44 AM

• Fake postings
  The amazon gosling postings have been discussed in many forums with varying opinions. Sorry to hear that you were impersonated. The sad thing is that Thomas Paul, moderator of Javaranch has admitted to putting up false reviews on the Javaranch site and seemed pissed that Amazon deleted them. I guess he was upset that amazon deleted false negative reviews so he simply forged prominent names of famous people and put positive reviews. Curious what his motivations were for attempting to discredit the author team?

  Two questions need to be answered beyond whether postings are false or not. Is the book a good one? I know it got good reviews on Javaranch and Java Developers Journal (which can't be forged) so the answer is most likely yes! The second more difficult question to ask is your own motivations. It does feel suspicious that the timing of your postings seemingly happen to coincide with the release of your own competing book.

  It is also curious to see that Thomas Paul has posted only positive reviews about your books and the moderators of Javaranch but can't seem to find a single posting that is positive from him on any other book.

  Since Amazon doesn't validate identity, imagine if someone took your ID and posted messages saying that Martin Fowler or Kent Beck recommended your book and you had to defend it. The authors of this book seemed to be negatively affected by the publicity and yet zero facts have been stated that any of them are guilty. All of the authors of this book have written more than one book and none of their other books seem to have the same problem which leads me to believe that Thomas Paul of Javaranch or some other person has a vendetta against them.

  In my opinion, it is somewhat unethical for another author to participate in slamming another authors book especially when they compete. It seems as if you are exploting the situation for your own advantage.
  

  Posted by: jjohnson on November 26, 2003 at 05:12 AM

• Fake postings
  I don't know who the idiot who posted the above is but he is completly off base. I have posted positive and negative reviews for regulars at JavaRanch. I have posted positive reviews for books that were had nothing to do with JavaRanch. You can see the 98 reviews that I have posted here:

  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-reviews/-/A1ST9PG26FSN2H

  I have never put up any false reviews on JavaRanch or amazon. Every review I have ever posted has been under my own name. I have no idea why the idiot thinks otherwise. I challenge the idiot to show any post of mine where I have admitted to putting up false reviews. In fact, the opposite is true. I have gotten amazon to remove obviously fake good reviews from James McGovern's books. The removal of the fake James Gosling review from McGovern's book was because of my request to amazon.

  If jjohnson was not a low life loser he would have contacted me directly instead of posting his lies to a web log that I normally don't read. I can only assume that he thinks slamming my good name will distract us from the fact that only James McGovern's books were given obviously spurious excellent reviews.

  Finally, I have no idea why I am being dragged into this. I have had nothing to do with James McGovern or his book in more than a month. I can only assume that someone is pissed that I revealed the lies.

  Posted by: tgpaul on November 26, 2003 at 01:30 PM

• Fake postings
  Tom, you admited to posting false reviews on Javaranch and seemed pissed that Amazon.com deleted them. You are also notorious for posting positive reviews for all your Javaranch buddies. It seems as if you get upset if authors have their friends post good reviews about their books but when you do it, it is ok. This is hypocritical.

  My posting to Richard was along the lines of him taking advantage of a situation. He knew of fake postings for months but yet chose to delay commenting on them until his book was released. This is simply dishonest.

  Richard, it would be interesting for us to know what you think of the book. In your opinion is it good or bad?

  As for you Tom, I do have a vendetta against you. I didn't appreciate getting bad grades simply because I wouldn't crawl under the desk

  Posted by: jjohnson on November 28, 2003 at 04:06 AM

• Fake postings
  At least we now know that jjohnson is really James McGovern. For those who care, the thread in JavaRanch where we discuss James McGovern is here:

  http://saloon.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=75&t=000045

  I have never posted a fake review to amazon. The review I posted used my name and stated right up front that I had not read the book. All I did was point out that the many reviews by people like James Gosling were spurious. I have absolutely no problems with friends posting reviews. I have a problem with people using the names of famous people in the industry to create phony reviews to promote their books.

  As far as my reviews go, I have been told that they are generally fair. You can see that by comparing my reviews to other reviews at amazon for the same books. At least one person who I consider a friend at JavaRanch has gotten a poor review on amazon from me.

  As far as the phony reviews of James McGovern's books, someone even tried to get JavaRanch to post a phony review of his book!

  I would finally like to note that I have never given any book by James McGovern a "bad grade". I have never read a book by him and have no intention of ever doing so. As fas as him crawling under the desk... more likely he crawled out from under a rock. The Java community would be grateful if he returned back under it.

  Posted by: tgpaul on November 29, 2003 at 02:00 PM

• Fake postings
  Just one more point... when I posted the review of the McGovern book I was not pissed that it was deleted. In fact, I fully expected it to be deleted since I had informed amazon that the review should be deleted when the Gosling review was deleted. I have great respect for the reviewing process at amazon and do what I can to keep it from being perverted by people who publish phony reviews under the names of industry icons like Dr. Gosling.

  Posted by: tgpaul on December 01, 2003 at 08:33 AM

• Another victim of fraud
  Anne Thomas Manes, here. And I am also quite irate from from the fraudulent use of my name. Someone created an Amazon userid called Ann Manes -- Research Director. I can't state with 100% certainty that there is no other research director in our industry named Ann Manes, but the chances are very slim. Manes is not an especially common name. More to the point, this user posted a 5-star comment on McGovern's book which starts with one of my quotes: "If you ask five people to define Web Services, you'll probably get at least six answers." This user also created a listmania list called "My favorite Web Services books" -- and low and behold, McGovern's book was at the top of the list. (remarkably, though, my own book wasn't included in the list). I complained to Amazon, and they refused to do anything about it. (although today I've noticed that the listmania list seems to have disappeared)

  For the most part I haven't experienced review attacks. Most of my reviews are positive, although I got a 1-star reveiw last week accusing the book of strong bias. (in stark contradiction to most of the other reviews) The reviewer claimed that I single out two vendors, but I can't for the life of me figure out which two vendors those might be.

  Posted by: atm on February 13, 2004 at 11:04 AM

• Another victim of fraud
  Try community-help@amazon.com. If you don't get what you want keep trying because the odds are that you will eventually reach someone who will fix the problem.

  Posted by: tgpaul on May 10, 2004 at 01:21 PM

• Maligned by fake postings. After more than a week of negative and malicious fake "reviews" posted about my book and personality on Amazon.com under phony names, I have pulled my book from Amazon.com until further notice. Last week, Amazon worked with my publisher to have the reviews deleted, however, within an hour to several hours after a deletion, another vicious review was posted. Enter the weekend, when apparently Amazon does not delete trashy reviews, when it is a free for all for people to slam a book or an author using Amazon.com as the hammer. I expect some bad reviews, as an author should, but my book's bad reviews seem to be coming from a person attempting to prevent sales of my book, due to a personal vendetta. Absurdly--there are more reviews posted about my book--than books sold through Amazon.com. My friends played the game, posted good reviews after the trashy reviews, but the relentless "reviewer" obviously stalks my page and posts bad reviews after the good ones. Professonal adults, we have better things to do with our time than to monitor a site when that's likely someone else's responsibility. So, just another warning to authors: Many postings on Amazon.com are fake and can discredit an author and prevent sales if enough people read, believe them, and copy them to other web sites.
  Cheers.

  Posted by: boston on January 14, 2006 at 05:15 PM

• I sold two items (electronics) on Amazon. The guy who bought the items asked me to ship them to Indonesia and even paid for shipping, which I did. I have Fedex proof of delivery. But then he told Amazon that he never got the items and Amazon now is refunding the money - almost 900 dollars back to this guy. I tried to prove Amazon that the guy had received the items. When I went to check my e-mail correspondence with this guy though, I found that all the messages from him, but one were, all of a sudden, blank. I don't know what program he used to erase the communication with me. Even an Amazon message alerting that an item was sold was gone too, except for the upper part of the e-mail.
  
  The guys (Joseph Dahlan) is using some US addresses and some other names and Amazon is buying his case. If these addresses are checked and the bank and/or credit accounts he is using are checked, it will be obvious that this guy is involved in a criminal activity and Amazon is doing nothing to investigate the issue. So the guy has both my items and now the money.

  What is interesting, though, Amazon is refunding the money to an e-mail address which never existed at the time of the deal between me and the buyer. Moreover, Amazon closed my account when I asked to investigate the matter thoroughly.

  Can anything be done about this?

  Posted by: bazuka on August 25, 2006 at 01:52 PM

• In 2004, I posted my one and only negative review of several reviews. The negative review, for a book on ancient Sumerian archeology, was specifically due to its lack of references and contested and unproven assertions. I cited a passage in which the author offered offhanded Semitic biased comments which were unproven assertions. I also cited references that the author had donated his entire library, upon his death, to a center for Semitic and biblical studies (even though he was an archeologist by profession). I offered alternative suggestions for archeological works based on primary evidence in the place of this book.

  Someone wrote a review which did not review the book but which attacked my review as ‘Nazi -ist’ and made some statement about how sad it is that Anti-Semitism is so rampant! O_O So, I hit the button to report this review yesterday since it did not actually comment on the book to be reviewed. Today, Amazon deleted my review and left the other one there. O_O Negative reviews are bad for books sales – so that may have had something to do with it. Or maybe, heaven forbid, anyone criticize a Jewish author. omg.

  Anyway, Amazon.com has lost another customer and reviewer. I will not purchase from Amazon again.
  

  Posted by: retinal_a on September 06, 2006 at 12:39 AM

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