Amazon sellers target UK with unsolicited parcels to boost sales
by Miranda Bryant from Technology | The Guardian on (#5R86J)
Scam known as brushing' is deployed to increase ranking in Amazon search system
More than 1m British households may have been targeted by a scam in which sellers on Amazon Marketplace send unsolicited packages to addresses in order to artificially increase their sales numbers, according to research.
The technique, known as brushing", involves sending items that are usually cheap to ship to unsuspecting people and logging them as genuine sales to increase a seller's sales statistics. The aim is to appear as highly ranked as possible in Amazon's search system, which prioritises those with high volumes and good reviews.
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