E-commerce Reputation Manipulation: The Emergence of Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service

摘要: In online markets, a store's reputation is closely tied to its profitability. Sellers' desire quickly achieve high has fueled profitable underground business, which operates as specialized crowdsourcing marketplace and accumulates wealth by allowing sellers harness human laborers conduct fake transactions for improving their stores' reputations. We term such an market seller-reputation-escalation (SRE) market. this paper, we investigate the impact of SRE service on escalation performing in-depth measurements prevalence service, business model size characteristics offered laborers. To end, have infiltrated five markets studied operations using daily data collection over continuous period two months. identified more than 11,000 posting at least 219,165 fake-purchase tasks markets. These earned $46,438 in revenue total value merchandise involved exceeded $3,452,530. Our study demonstrates that can increase reputations 10 times faster legitimate ones while only 2.2% them were detected penalized. Even worse, found newly launched can, within single day, boost seller's degree would require seller year accomplish. Finally, armed with our analysis operational economy, offer some insights into potential mitigation strategies.