Not all the reviews you read on websites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor and Google Play can be taken at face value. It’s becoming increasingly common for companies and developers to buy fake reviews and ratings on these sites, in the same way, that you can get thousands of Twitter followers overnight by paying for them. The fraudulent reviewers are usually real people (Amazon won’t let you post a review unless you’ve bought at least one item from the store) who have signed up with services such as LaunchZon (launchzon.com) that bulk-sell bogus opinions. Alternatively, they advertise their writing skills through task marketplaces such as Fiverr (www.fiverr.com), which last year was at the center of Amazon’s clampdown on fake reviews that involved the store suing 1,114 alleged perpetrators. Current listings on Fiverr include ‘I will post a positive review anywhere’ and ‘I will write perfect reviews for your Android apps’ – clearly the community hasn’t learned its lesson.
You can identify many of these paid-for reviews by using common sense – click the reviewer’s name to
see all the opinions they’ve posted; if the text is very similar, they’re
almost definitely a shill. Additionally, fake reviews are often vague, brief or
over-enthusiastic, for example: “Best book/tablet/waffle maker I’ve ever
bought, worth every penny!”.
For more scientific analysis, paste
Fakespot isn’t always right, but the more reviews it
analyses, the more accurate it becomes – it’s already checked more than
390,000. There are also Fakespot extensions for Chrome (click here)
and Firefox, so you can scan review pages on the fly.
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