So last April-May, I built a chrome extension that detects fake reviews on Amazon. It analyzes a combination of factors about the linguistics of the review (part of speech tags, unigrams and bigrams analysis), the reviewer metadata (rank, percent helpful reviews, number of reviews...), and the overall product reviews statistics (standard deviation, percent one time reviewers... etc).

At the end the reviews quality are scored on all these factors to give the product reviews a letter grade rating where "F" means that the product is very likely to have gone through a reviews bombing campaign and an "A" grade is for a product that contains mostly reliable reviews from reliable reviewers.

On the side I've been applying to Amazon jobs, and the last one I applied I included in my resume that I made such an app. About a couple of weeks later I get an email saying I was lined up for an interview. The interview went OK, I didn't do great in it to be honest, I didn't do bad either. I got asked about the chrome extension I made to describe what it did and why I did it which I obliged in answering.

Two weeks later, I contacted them to know about the hiring process and I got a reply that I was not considered for the job and that they couldn't share the reason why.

That sucked. What stung me even further, and made me believe that the interview was only a sham reason to only know about my app, was the fact that the product that I used as an illustration on the chrome extension store got banned. Not only that, but multiple products from the same seller and other sellers in that product category engaging in review deception schemes also got banned or more in their lingo "Discontinued".

BUT the app still detects products with deceptive reviews in other categories so it wasn't a site-wide update.

This is my story. Do with it as you wish. And be careful in dealing with large corporations.

Edit: Here's the link to the chrome extension in question:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/evalute-amazon-reviews-le/cfngaogeljebhifobnjlhoakgaogmndj?hl=en