The email arrived before the product did. That’s how you know you’re being asked to post fake Amazon wig reviews before you’ve even touched the thing.
If a brand contacts you to ask for a five star review before you’ve received the item, before you’ve opened it, before you’ve put it on your head and lived in it for a bit and formed any kind of actual opinion, what they’re asking for is not a review. They’re asking for marketing copy. Five stars with your name on it, and the sequence is designed so that the social obligation to follow through is already sitting there before you’ve experienced a single thing.
I get emails like this regularly. I usually ignore them. But this time I didn’t.
The brand: Feshfen Hair, also known as Sofeiyan
The email came in from Feshfen Hair, which also operates under the name Sofeiyan on Amazon. Here’s what they asked for, word for word:
“We need a 5 star amazon review with wearing pictures or mini video + seller store feedback. Since we need the verified purchased amazon review, so you should buy on amazon first. After review live on amazon, we will arrange refund via Paypal or amazon gift card.”
Let’s just sit with that for a second.
Buy it yourself first, so it registers as a verified purchase. Post a five star review with photos or video. Leave store feedback too. And then, only after all of that is live on Amazon, they’ll refund you. Via PayPal or gift card, off platform, so there’s no trace of it in the transaction.
That’s not a gifting arrangement. That’s paying for reviews. Specifically structured to create verified purchase reviews, which carry more weight on Amazon, in exchange for money back after the fact. Amazon’s own policies explicitly prohibit this. The whole point of the verified purchase badge is that it signals a real transaction from a real customer. This arrangement is designed to fake exactly that.
But I had a question. What if I received the product and it wasn’t five star material?
“customer should buy on amazon first, then after get the product could try it first. if you like, you could help us write a 5 star amazon review. If you don’t like or product have some problem, you could contact us first, then return the product to amazon”
So I pushed further. What if I buy it and give it four stars or three? If it isn’t five, would I need to return it?
“actually, we only need a 5 star amazon review if the product doesn’t have any quality problem.”
So. To translate: if the product is fine, they want five stars. If it’s not fine, return it. At no point did anyone suggest that three stars, or four stars, or any honest reflection of a mixed experience, was an acceptable outcome. The only two options on the table were five stars or a return. An actual review, the kind where you say what you genuinely think, was never part of the arrangement.
The specific product they wanted me to five-star is the Sofeiyan Long Straight Wig with Curtain Bangs, a 22 inch small lace front in Light Ash Brown Ombre, heat-resistant synthetic, listed on Amazon UK. On paper it sounds reasonable enough. Layered ends, curtain bangs, breathable cap, adjustable drawstring, claims of tangle-free fibres that can handle low heat. The kind of listing that reads well. The kind of listing with a lot of confident bullet points.
As of writing this post it has four reviews. All five stars. I’m not saying every one of those was generated through the same process they tried with me. I genuinely don’t know that. But I do know what they asked me to do, and I know exactly what the options were. Draw your own conclusions.
Who is actually behind Feshfen?
Public trademark records show FESHFEN is owned by Xiamen Kuangyuan Trade Co., Ltd., a Chinese export company operating since 2012. The same company also filed another hair brand trademark, HALOO, in 2021.
Sofeiyan appears alongside FESHFEN products on Amazon, and the email contacting me came from Feshfen Hair. I can’t definitively state whether Sofeiyan is a separate legal entity or simply another seller identity tied to the same operation, but the overlap is obvious enough to raise questions.
The broader point is this: one company, multiple brand names, all selling hair on Amazon. This is an extremely common setup. It’s not illegal in itself. But it does mean that if you’ve had a bad experience with one brand name and swear you’ll never buy from them again, you might not realise you’re buying from the same company under a different label. And it means their review profiles are spread across multiple listings and multiple brand names, which makes it harder to get a clear picture of any of them.
Why fake Amazon wig reviews are an Amazon-wide problem, not just a Feshfen problem
Feshfen aren’t uniquely terrible. They’re just unusually transparent about it. The practice of paying for fake Amazon wig reviews, structured as a buy-then-refund arrangement to generate verified purchase badges, is absolutely rampant in the alternative hair space and has been for years. I could show you a folder of emails that follow exactly the same pattern. Free wig or topper, five stars required, any problems to be handled privately and quietly away from the review section where they might actually be useful to other shoppers.
Some of the brands doing this are decent enough products that would probably get good reviews anyway. Some of them are not. But the issue is that you, as the person trying to decide whether to spend £40 or £80 or £150 on something for your head, cannot tell from the Amazon reviews which is which. You don’t know if those 4.7 stars represent genuine experience from genuine buyers. You don’t know how many of those reviewers were refunded via PayPal after their review went live. You just see a lot of stars and a lot of “great quality, fast shipping” and make a decision based on that.
And sometimes you make the wrong decision. Because the stars were bought.
Why people accept these deals
I want to be fair here because it’s easy to frame this as “people are lying” and it’s more complicated than that. A lot of people who accept these offers are not malicious. They’re just people who want their hair to look better and can’t necessarily afford to spend hundreds of pounds on a wig. The promise of a full refund after posting a review is genuinely appealing when money is tight. They receive the product, it’s okay, maybe not amazing but okay, and they give the five stars because that was the deal and the refund is waiting on the other side of it.
The problem is that “okay but I’m getting refunded and felt obliged” is a very different data point from “I paid for this with my own money and it was genuinely worth it.” And Amazon reviews don’t distinguish between those two things. They just both count as five stars.
Where to find Amazon wig reviews you can actually trust
Reddit. Genuinely. r/femalehairloss and r/wigs are full of people who bought things with their own money and are telling you exactly what they think with no incentive to be anything other than honest. Nobody’s being offered a PayPal refund to post on Reddit. The reviews there are real.
Instagram. Look for people who have been posting consistently about alternative hair for a while. Check whether they disclose when something is gifted. A creator who clearly marks gifted products and has a history of honest, including negative, reviews is a much more reliable source than a product listing with 847 five star reviews and suspiciously similar phrasing across half of them.
YouTube. Same principle. Look for creators who have reviewed things they paid for themselves, who have given honest mixed or negative reviews, and who disclose gifted items clearly. Length of time in the community matters too. Someone who’s been posting about wigs and toppers for years has more to lose by recommending something rubbish than someone who appeared three months ago with a handful of five star review videos.
Facebook groups. The hair loss and alternative hair Facebook groups are another solid source of real-person reviews. People post photos, ask questions, share experiences. Not curated, not incentivised, just people talking to each other about stuff they’ve tried.
How to spot fake Amazon wig reviews on the listing itself
If you’re buying on Amazon, you’re not helpless, but you do need to look more carefully. Filter for verified purchase reviews only. Read the one, two and three star reviews, not just the fives. Look at whether the critical reviews describe the same issues repeatedly, that tells you something real. Check if the brand has multiple listings under slightly different names (Feshfen and Sofeiyan being a prime example, or HALOO if that’s connected as the trademark records suggest), because brands sometimes distribute reviews across listings or start fresh when an old one gets too many negatives to bury.
There are also browser extensions that analyse Amazon review authenticity, Fakespot being the main one, that can give you a rough sense of how trustworthy a product’s review profile looks. Not perfect, but useful.
I’m not saying every Amazon wig with good reviews is a scam. Some genuinely good products are on there and get good reviews because they’re genuinely good. But when you’re spending real money on something for your head, something that matters to you, you deserve to know that the information you’re basing that decision on is real. And right now, a lot of it isn’t.
Do the extra bit of research. Check Reddit. Find a creator who paid for their own stuff. Read the critical reviews. It takes an extra ten minutes and it will save you from making a decision based on stars that were bought before the product even shipped.
If you’ve had a similar experience with a brand, or bought something based on glowing Amazon reviews only to regret it later, I’d genuinely love to hear about it.
You can find me on Instagram at @neveen.wood, and brands I personally use and trust are listed at neveenwood.com/discount-codes.
