a weblog for skeptical consumers

The Activeion is a spray bottle that cleans your home with ionized tap water.  I’m not going to focus on this product’s dubios claims or the fact that it is unfortunately endorsed by Bill Nye the Science Guy. This has been covered very well in Brian Dunning’s post on skepticblog.org. It suffices it to say that there appears to be little actual science behind the product and it is very disappointing that Bill Nye, a childhood hero to many skeptics, has gotten mixed up with it. Instead, I will be focusing on some extremely suspicious Amazon.com reviews for the product.

On their website, Activeion has a graphic saying “Check out customer reviews on amazon.com.” The graphic shows 5 yellows stars, suggesting that they have a 5-star review rating. When you click on the graphic you are taken to the reviews page on Amazon for the Activeion AI1004 Ionator HOM, their least expensive product. Least expensive in this case means $179.99 for a squirt bottle. Their actual review rating (as of this writing) is 4 stars, not the 5-star rating shown on their website. There are ten customer reviews; seven 5-star reviews, one 3-star review, and two 1-star review. When we look into the content of these reviews, the discussion for each (you can comment on individual reviews), and the people that left each review we discover some very suspicious patterns.

Let’s start with the two 1-star reviews to illustrate what a legitimate review should look like. Each of these reviews was left by a person with a large history of Amazon.com reviews.  One person has written 95 reviews, the other has written 88 reviews. Each reviewer has reviewed a wide range of products and given ratings ranging from 1-star to 5-star. They do not have a history of focusing on similar products or only giving bad reviews. Each reviewer ran a number of tests comparing their Activeion to ordinary water and came to the same conclusion, that it does not clean any better than water. I don’t know whether these people would call themselves skeptics, but they certainly behaved as skeptics. I can see no reason not to assume that these are legitimate product reviews written by real people who actually have experience with this product.

The single 3-star review is a little less straight forward. I do believe that this is also a legitimate review because the reviewer has left 49 reviews on a variety of products. However, he is clearly not a skeptic. He tested the product on a number of surfaces, but he did not directly compare it to ordinary water. The last sentence of his review is especially telling, “I believe it is sanitizing. I just need to convince myself it is.” These are not the words of a skeptic. He says it cleans countertops, mirrors, fabric, and fruit well but does not consider that so does water. He gave the product a 3-star review because it could not clean the tub or the shower, so he “could never use this to replace [chemical] cleaners.”

And now we get to the seven 5-star reviews. There are several reasons to suspect that these reviews are fraudulent. Only one of these people has ever reviewed another product (and only once). For the other six, Activeion is their only product review. Compare this to the 1-star and 3-star reviewers who have an average of 77 reviews each. The reviews themselves contain some suspicious content and odd similarities. One reviewer wrote “my Activeion completely removed a blood stain from my light beige carpet” and another wrote “It completely removed a red wine spill from our beige carpet.” These reviews share another interesting characteristic. Each has the exact same comment left by the exact same person, a link to an FTC article about endorsement and testimonial guidelines. I emailed the Amazon user who left these comments, Miss Margaret Picky, and asked her why she had posted the link.  This was her response:

“The reason I posted that link is because Amazon doesn’t like it when commenters attack other commenters by calling them shills.  Activeion links to the Amazon reviews from their corporate website and as an experienced reviewer it is obvious that these were solicited reviews.  I am not saying that I know for a fact that they are fraudulent–the reviewers may have used the item–but the FTC requires people to reveal any material connection or that they received a review product or payment for their review, as does Amazon guidelines.  I suspect that most or all of the five-star reviewers did not pay for their device and/or are somehow related to the company or its distributors yet do not reveal this and it should be reported to the FTC.  The tone of some of the reviews is amusing, they sound like advertising copy.  Two reviewers state they are “fans”.  Another wishes them good luck with the product.  At least one of them is located near the corporate offices.  This has been discussed on the forum for Vine reviewers.”

“Vine reviewers” refers to Amazon’s Vine program in which trusted and experienced reviewers are provided with new and pre-release items to review. Like Margaret, I have no direct evidence that Activeion has been manipulating their Amazon rating by posting fraudulent reviews.  However, the fact that they link to their Amazon reviews from their homepage suggests that they have a strong motivation to keep their rating as high as possible.  Based on the drastically different characteristics between the positive and negative reviews for their product I believe it is reasonable to be suspicious.

I leave you with a video posted by one of the 1-star reviewers comparing the Activeion to plain water on a wine stain.