I am looking for a new can opener. This one gets nothing but 5 star reviews. Which is unusual in itself. Funny thing is, not one of the reviews is for this product. Or the same product, as far as I can tell.
Reviews.
Has anyone seen this before? I’m aware of fake reviews on Amazon. These don’t seem like the usual joke review.
That’s fucked up.
You’re right: not one of the reviews seems to actually be for the Can Opener Manual Food Grade Stainless Steel Tin Opener Hanldhled Jar Opener Ergonomic Anti Slip Big Turn Knob and Rubber Soft Handle Ultra Sharp Blades Ideal For Seniors/Arthritis being sold.
I laughed, because I never actually read past “can opener” in the name. That is as bad as the reviews.
Hanldhled is my favorite part.
The earliest review (for “slims sandalwood”) is from April 2007. The most recent from Dec. 2018.
So this seems to have been going on a long time.
But I don’t see how Amazon hasn’t caught on to this yet. Has the review systems been gamed in some way? (Like those dozens of fake 5 star reviews that instantly appear on some new cheap junk products. Mrs. FtG fell for an item with a bunch of those. And the fake reviews promptly went away after it was bought.)
At random I picked a reviewer and started checking their reviews. Seems mostly okay at first. But then “blocks” of identical reviews appear.
So this isn’t someone who is just piling on with funny reviews. It’s a misdirected spam review.
I just clicked on REPORT for a few of those reviews. I wonder if anything will happen?
It’s not just the reviews. Even the questions halfway down the page are geared toward unrelated products (or are absurdist on a “Crazy Sam Beckett play” level):
I use ReviewMeta, and extension for Chrome that analyzes reviews on Amazon. Checks for fakes, duplicates, and general weirdness in Amazon reviews.
Very useful. Also available for FireFox and Edge.
I first saw this about a month ago. A cow-orker theorized that, since in my case the “sold by” was not Amazon, that the seller simply re-used the same Amazon ID (ASIN, I think) for a different product.
But in this case, every review seems to be about something different.
ETA: has anyone checked to see if they were somehow cribbed from other items on Amazon? Like, Hubert writes a review for a retro encabulator and then somehow this user was able to “steal” that review onto his own items?
Who could ask for anything more in a can opener?
Well, it would be nice if it opened cans as well.
The Worst Things For Sale is also another good source.
Some years back I went through a few can openers in a short period. My mother had arthritis and couldn’t open cans easily, so I bought the ergonomic one at Wal-mart with big handles that were supposed to be easy to use. It broke. Others I tried didn’t work well, or broke, or both. I ended up getting an EZ-DUZ-IT, made-in-usa model. They used to make the old Swing-A-Way openers until the company switched manufacturing to China, so they continued making the old, heavy-duty openers with the name EZ-DUZ-IT. There’s a whole backstory to it.
I bought one. It cost more than the ones at Wal-mart, but it opens cans quite easily with its oversized handles and gears. I wipe the carbon steel gears/blade after every use, put some olive oil on it when I remember, and I still have it. A picky friend bought one when I told him about it and he liked it a lot.
Thought I’d throw that out there.
I was looking at some mattress protectors the other day.
All of the reviews were for a designer tip for an icing gun.
I’m glad to see from the pictures that it can open BRAND NAME brand Tinbery’s Specials, with FOOD MOCKUPS flavoring.
Did you look at the last photo in the column on the left? A masterpiece of Photoshop artistry.
Note that Amazon products have short coded URLs. The one in the OP can be given as:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PRMG2LD/
A typo in the coded part in a spam review company’s DB will result in the spam reviews being mis-sent to the wrong product.
Curses upon you for leading me to a site that is such an addictive time suck
Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps what we are actually seeing is the 21st C. equivalent of a numbers station sending coded info.