This year's Cyber Monday was historic. With holiday shoppers spending close to $11 billion, the U.S. set a record for its largest internet shopping day ever, according to Adobe Analytics data. But how do these shoppers know what they're purchasing is the real deal? Enter Fakespot, a platform that just raised $4 million dollars to help consumers protect themselves from e-commerce scams in real-time on leading online marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify sites.
"There's not many people in the corner that are protecting consumers from e-commerce scams. They're everywhere," said Saoud Khalifah, co-founder and CEO of Fakespot. "We're really excited to protect the consumers from these scams."
The startup's mission is to bring trust and transparency to the Internet, starting with e-commerce. Fakespot is doing this by utilizing proprietary AI and machine learning to analyze critical data points including reviews, third-party sellers, and reputation data. Khalifah adds, "We've amassed over eight billion reviews. Just to give you a comparison, Tripadvisor has over 800 million reviews. So we utilize this huge dataset for our supervised training, for our artificial intelligence, and it makes us better and [puts] us 10 steps ahead of all the fraudsters."
Consumers can install Fakespot through a Google Chrome extension. Then, in real-time, online shoppers will be notified whether the reviews they are reading are real or fake. "If you're browsing Amazon.com, we will, in real-time, show grades from an A to an F, meaning you can trust the reviews that you're reading, or you can move to the next product if the grade is an F," according to Khalifah. "We also detect fake sellers and counterfeits, and many other issues that are now plaguing e-commerce."
One e-commerce giant that Fakespot is ready to deploy its newest technology on is Shopify. "We will be detecting fake stores, hack stores, [and] stores that will siphon off your private information, which is a [bigger] problem than most people know … we're looking to encapsulate the whole e-commerce market with our protective services," he said.
As online shopping continues to become more and more popular with shoppers, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, Fakespot is taking pride in its new and innovative platform. "We're one of the first pioneers in this space for consumer technology and the protection of people on fraud. There's not many companies in this space," Khalifah says. "This industry's very nascent and we have a lot of potential here. And the market is just growing."
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A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
