I have worked a lot of odd jobs in my life. “Wait, what the hell does that have to do with the title?” Here, let me rephrase that. I’ve worked a lot of odd jobs online in my life. There’s lots of ways to make a quick buck doing shady shit. I’ve done things from work with high fructose corn syrup propaganda groups to help them trick customers into thinking it’s better than sugar to being an eBay hitman. I’m sure you’re laughing at eBay hitman, but I shit you not that’s what I was called by the contractor. It was not a title I chose. People are just now realizing that Google is nothing but an abused SEO tool that barely functions as an authentic search engine. What’s shocked me is people haven’t realized user reviews are fake.
Every time I tell people this, the first question they ask is, “Why did you do this?” Simple: I needed money. I first started doing this when I was 15 and wanted money to buy video games. One day my sister questioned how I kept getting packages from Amazon and eBay despite having no job. I stopped doing this when I turned 18 and started doing it again when I was 22, due to a lack of funds. Once I found a stable job I stopped doing it again. When I was 15 I would get paid 10 cents per forum post I made defending a product and $2 per Amazon and eBay review. I also got the products for free, so I could leave a review. I made an average of $8 per product. When I was 22 it was $1 per Reddit post, $5 per Amazon and eBay review, and $20 per eBay hit. I would make about $30 per product, plus I got a free product. Unless I did an eBay hit. Then I would get $50.
The second question asked is, “How the hell did you even hear about this?” I used to get paid for surveys and to help with corporate propaganda. I lied about my age to do these surveys. That “job” was just a web portal and maybe one day I’ll talk about it too. Through doing this work I was linked with someone who asked if I would leave a review for a product, to get it for free. I wound up getting a Wii Pro Controller skin. It was black and stopped my hands from slipping when playing. I left a positive review and it was apparently a really good review. They liked it wasn’t just a, “Great product!” They liked that I made it sound useful and brought up one negative, which was fixed in a later revision (that I also got for free), but said the product was able to easily shine past that negative. This showed I was trustworthy and wouldn’t run off with a product and that I left believable positive reviews. The company later gave me $5 just because their sales did increase.
Due to this being my job as a teen to early adulthood I spent all my time on the computer. I was told to Google the products as much as possible and find forums discussing it and then deny all negative claims from the users and start flamewars to discredit them. I would report this and then get paid for flaming people. Sometimes I wouldn’t even need to lie/flame to defend the product because the person I was supposed to target was lying about the product. This is the important part about getting the products for free. Not only did it less us review them on the platforms but if we used the product we could make better forum posts to stop/help spread misinformation. If you’re curious about people lying on the forums it’s important to point out we could also get paid to spread misinformation about competitor products/sellers. I rarely did these jobs when I was younger. I only did it for products/stores I had bones to pick.
As an adult I never took on the attacking another store/product on Reddit. I was paid to defend shit on Reddit and leave positive reviews on eBay and Amazon. Reviews were the same as when I was a kid, except I wasn’t allowed to say anything negative. As mentioned above, I was an eBay hitman too. This was some slimy ass shit, but I needed to eat. This is something I would do once every 2 months, because if you did it too often eBay/Amazon would flag your account. The way this worked is a seller would contact you and give you the money + S&H + $30 to buy a specific product from a specific company. We were also given a guide on how to tell something is a fake product, even a highly detailed fake. Once we got the product we were to report the store for selling fakes. I’ve reported tons of stores and this is why I am able to verify the authenticity of random products, especially sex toys. Those PDFs they’d send were insanely detailed. The reason I stopped doing this is because for my last contract I got a legit product. The company that contracted me wanted a highly detailed scan of the label and they overnighted a box with the fake label on it in another box. I then sent the report as fake to eBay and then I told them to never hire me for these services again, because that was scummy.
The online market experience is insanely scummy and scammy. Did you notice how the company that wanted me to report others for fakes had fakes on hand overnighted to me while cloning a label? Because I sure as shit did and this was one of the things that pushed me into buying things locally. A lot of these stores are selling high quality fakes. They will do anything to cripple their competitors. That “honest” reviewer you’re trusting on YouTube/Reddit/any social media? More than likely they’re getting paid for it by the company. Some of the companies tried to get me to make YouTube videos but I didn’t want to do all that shit. They sent an example of talking points and how shots needed to be set up, etc. Too much shit for an extra $50 a month + YouTube rev.
“Oh but I will just look at their profile or Google them!” Yeah, that doesn’t help. During the forum days I would join a forum under another user’s name from a different forum. This way if you Googled surferboi89 you didn’t see an account spamming forums for these products. You saw someone using forums like a normal person. I would also join and then pose as them on these new forums. I even took the time to get grammar and spelling mistakes down. After about a month or two of joining I’d shill on that forum and keep posting after. I was managing over 30 different forum accounts at one point as they were all “cooking”, as I called it. I did the same shit with Reddit and adopted Reddit shit like, “Hey there friendo! Looks like we’re on the same subreddits!” When you have a very obvious culture caused by creating a hugbox it’s insanely simple to infiltrate. This is also why I have too many fucking email addresses, for every email platform. Those of us who did this for more than a month knew how to stay hidden.
All of this explains how eBay stores that fucking suck have high approval ratings. They paid us to boost their ratings, and take out competition. This is also why EVERYTHING on Amazon is 3.5 stars, or more. They’re just buying reviews for pennies on the dollar. To stop Amazon and eBay from figuring out what was going on we would never be linked to a store that was in our state or one within 1 state of us. This means if you were in Texas you would never review/report anyone from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arizona. This actually made people who didn’t live near California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Washington super important. If you lived in Colorado you could get tons of high value targets and products. These companies know how to game the system, and we had to learn too.
I’ve worked for companies that are “highly trusted and respected” by people online. Yes, even some of the big ones do this shit. I doubt they’re still paying people for fake reviews now but I am positive they’re still hiring eBay hitmen to stop rising competition. My suggestion to avoid all this? Buy locally. It’s extremely hard to avoid this entire scam when shopping online. This shit isn’t going to stop. Companies are using these services to bot their apps on the app stores. I’m sure some are doing it for their games on Steam since it boosts your SEO on Steam once you get 10 reviews. I imagine with AI getting better some companies will use real people to verify accounts and then have AI do all of this work to trick people. It’s a shitty past and most likely it’s going to a grim future when it comes to online shopping.