It’s no secret that a lot of the reviews on Amazon.com are fake. It’s a particular giveaway when some obscure, generic item has thousands of nearly identical five-star reviews. In a slightly more sophisticated version of the scheme, some companies will pay reviewers to say nice things about their products. In that spirit, I’ve started getting a couple of entreaties a week to review items on eBay for cash.

See for example:

It’s clearly a scam, but what scam is it precisely? Are these lousy headphones for which they figure they’ll get better reviews if they pay people? They don’t seem to be giving the headphones for free, so maybe they’re $10 headphones that they sell for $40 by offering a $15 review payment. And maybe they double down on the fraud by not even paying the $15.

So basically, if you are considering buying some bluetooth earbuds, don’t get these.