How to spot and stop fake reviews

“Last year, after always hav­ing had five-star reviews on Google, I sud­den­ly start­ed receiv­ing four one-star reviews almost week­ly from some­one who’d obvi­ous­ly just set up their pro­file.” 

So says Lisa John­son, an inde­pen­dent man­age­ment con­sul­tant and coach, who adds that the mys­tery review­er was writ­ing “weird things about my work that only some­one fol­low­ing me online could know, such as a com­peti­tor. Even stranger was that some of the names being used were male – and I wasn’t coach­ing any men at the time.”

John­son is far from the only vic­tim of such decep­tion. The manip­u­la­tion of poten­tial cus­tomers by post­ing fake bad reviews of a rival’s offer­ings (or fake good reviews of one’s own) is a grow­ing trend. This kind of fraud can have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on a young busi­ness.

Bogus or not, a bad review “still holds weight”, accord­ing to Liam Chen­nells, founder and CEO of Detect­ed, a busi­ness-ver­i­fi­ca­tion plat­form. For one thing, not every read­er will detect the mal­ice behind it, espe­cial­ly if it’s well writ­ten enough to seem cred­i­ble. 

“Few peo­ple look beneath the sur­face, so poor online rat­ings def­i­nite­ly affect how com­pa­nies are per­ceived,” he says. “Also, peo­ple will nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tate towards the one bad review, rather than the 99 great ones. It’s just how most of us are wired.”

Reviews matter more than ever

The boom in online shop­ping that’s accom­pa­nied the Covid cri­sis has increased con­sumers’ reliance on reviews, giv­en that they can’t feel the qual­i­ty of the goods before buy­ing.

Accord­ing to soft­ware com­pa­ny Pow­er­Re­views, shop­pers were engag­ing with reviews 89% more in May 2020, after most coun­tries had imposed lock­downs, than they had been in Feb­ru­ary. 

Because con­sumers have become so inter­est­ed in oth­ers’ opin­ions, fraud­u­lent reviews are more effec­tive than ever before, says Pow­er­Re­views’ CEO, Mark Dil­lon. He believes that, “although fakes are fair­ly obvi­ous to the more expe­ri­enced ecom­merce shop­per, new­er online con­sumers may not be as savvy. Some web­sites will allow any­one to write a prod­uct review, whether that per­son and their pur­chase were ver­i­fied or not. This is obvi­ous­ly risky in the cur­rent cli­mate.”

Accord­ing to research pub­lished by Which? mag­a­zine in March, fake reviews are a boom­ing busi­ness. Ama­zon has banned sell­ers from pay­ing third par­ties to pub­lish reviews, yet com­pa­nies such as Germany’s AMZTigers are open­ly offer­ing write-ups for sale. There’s also an emerg­ing trend for fraud­u­lent reviews to be blast­ed out en masse by bots. Fraud-pre­ven­tion spe­cial­ist Cheq esti­mates that these account for about 5% of fakes.

Some unscrupu­lous ven­dors think noth­ing of pay­ing for such ser­vices. A recent sur­vey by mar­ket­ing agency Reboot has found that 10.8% of respon­dents would con­sid­er pay­ing for bogus reviews when sell­ing goods online. The com­pa­ny had pre­vi­ous­ly found, when it polled near­ly 1,700 busi­ness own­ers in 2020, that 18.3% would con­sid­er try­ing to sab­o­tage a rival’s online busi­ness if they thought they would get away with it. 

Do the platforms do enough?

The Com­pe­ti­tion and Mar­kets Author­i­ty (CMA) is inves­ti­gat­ing whether Ama­zon and Google have bro­ken con­sumer law in the UK by doing too lit­tle to iden­ti­fy and remove bogus reviews. This fol­lows a sim­i­lar probe into Face­book, Insta­gram and eBay, which were ordered in 2019 to do more to remove fraud­u­lent write-ups from their sites. All three respond­ed by sus­pend­ing or ban­ning dozens of sell­ers. 

Ama­zon has promised to coop­er­ate with the CMA, say­ing that it devotes sig­nif­i­cant resources to weed­ing out fake or paid-for reviews. Since Jan­u­ary, it has sus­pend­ed about 300 Chi­nese ven­dors that it sus­pect­ed of offer­ing finan­cial incen­tives in exchange for good reviews. 

Google has also been deal­ing with fake busi­ness reviews left on its Maps nav­i­ga­tion plat­form. It reports that it has blocked or removed 55 mil­lion pol­i­cy-vio­lat­ing reviews and near­ly three mil­lion bogus busi­ness pro­files. 

Despite such reme­di­al actions, many peo­ple believe that the big play­ers are still fail­ing to respond quick­ly enough to com­plaints about fake reviews.

John­son was cer­tain­ly unhap­py with Google’s response when she alert­ed it to the mali­cious cam­paign against her busi­ness.

“When I assured them that the reviews were fake, they refused to do any­thing about it,” she recalls. “They said they couldn’t tell whether they were real or fake. I was wor­ried about what it would do to my busi­ness, as my rat­ing was already down to 4.5 stars.”

Oth­er vic­tims describe weeks of toing and fro­ing before fraud­u­lent reviews were delet­ed.

Chen­nells notes that “com­pa­nies such as Trust­Pi­lot have invest­ed in tech­nol­o­gy to uncov­er fake reviews, but oth­ers still have far to go. There is often a view that it’s no one’s prob­lem and unpre­ventable. Stronger ver­i­fi­ca­tion process­es, both for indi­vid­u­als and for busi­ness­es, would go a long way to solv­ing this.”

How to respond to fake reviews

The process of chal­leng­ing reviews varies from site to site, but those wish­ing to com­plain are gen­er­al­ly advised to check both their own reviews and those of their rivals reg­u­lar­ly and report them to the plat­form.

In the case of appar­ent­ly fake pos­i­tive reviews about a com­peti­tor, it’s also a good idea to con­tact the own­er of that busi­ness, as it’s not unusu­al for a rogue mar­ket­ing agency to gen­er­ate these with­out per­mis­sion.

It’s even pos­si­ble to turn bad reviews to your advan­tage. After John­son got lit­tle change out of Google, she tried a dif­fer­ent tack.

“I’d seen James Blunt and Gary Linek­er write wit­ty ripostes to Twit­ter trolls, so I decid­ed to take a leaf out of their book. I respond­ed to every review and post­ed my replies all over my social media accounts,” she says. “My audi­ence found this so amus­ing that they start­ed ask­ing me if I’d received any more bad reviews yet, so they could see my respons­es.”