If reviews of the last completely necessary and not at all superfluous thing you bought on Amazon look like so much copypasta, there's a good reason: fake reviews abound and people are getting paid to post them.

On Monday, Amazon sued over 10,000 administrators from Facebook groups which coordinated money and commodities for willing consumers to create artificial reviews. Amazon's lawsuits claim that there were coordinated global groups aimed at enlisting wannabe fake reviewers. These fake review coordinators operated the online platforms in Amazon's retail stores both in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Italy.

If 10,000 Facebook groups sounds like a lot, it's apparently the sum total of groups Amazon has reported to Facebook since 2020. The company notes that past legal action it's taken has been effective and "shut down multiple major review brokers," and yet here we are. They've been suing people for this stuff since all the way back in 2015.

Amazon and Google face UK CMA probe over fake reviews

The company entitled one group, "Amazon Product Review," which counted more than 40,000 members until Facebook shut it down earlier in 2022. That one stayed under the radar using the classic, AI-varying ploy of altering a few of the letters in some of the phrases that would otherwise get it shut down.

According to it, Amazon will employ the discovery process to "identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters that haven't already been detected by Amazon's advanced technology, expert investigators and continuous monitoring."

Continuous monitoring aside, it's evident that millions and millions of false reviews are sending products streaming across the internet retailer's virtual mall every day, across the globe. And officials are paying attention — something sure to fan a little flame under everyone's favorite online shopping goliath.

For years, Amazon has taken a beating over reviews in the form of inflated ratings. An investigation by The Washington Post from way back in 2018 found obviously fake reviews that comprised most of certain categories, namely bluetooth headphones and health supplements.

At the time the Post found a thriving cottage industry selling fake reviews on Facebook. Sellers court Amazon shoppers on Facebook across "dozens of networks, including Amazon Review Club and Amazon Reviewers Group, to give glowing feedback in exchange for money or other compensation," according to the Post.

Amazon acknowledged the scale of the issue in a blog post last year. "Due to our continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts, we have seen an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit fake reviews outside of Amazon, particularly through social media services," the company wrote.

Amazon said it flagged more than 1,000 review-selling groups on social media in the first quarter of 2021 — triple the number for the same period last year. Whether that reflects a bigger problem with fake reviews or the online retailer taking them more seriously isn't clear, but the company was quick to shift the blame to social media companies for their lax enforcement of those groups when they violate platform rules.

Ultimately, fake reviews aren't the worst kind of misleading content that internet companies are failing to eradicate. But they are another example of how, when you have a massive enough cash-printing-or cash-burning internet machine, systemic problems can spiral out of control while you were head down making the line go up. And sometimes those problems incentivize all kinds of bad or weird stuff. In this case: There is small industry of people making money off of wrapping the bad products in a well-tuned look-and-feel package — and once that is all in motion, it becomes damn near impossible to untangle the mess the big money machine created.