![]() It’s an issue the FTC considers to be one of the principal problems with online marketing. “That’s definitely a higher risk scenario compared to going to a restaurant for dinner where, worst case, you just get a bad meal.” “If you go to a doctor with a lot of fake reviews and you don’t recognize that, it could affect your health,” she says. Situations involving fake reviews get particularly dicey when consumer safety is on the line, says Beibei Li, an associate professor of IT and management at Carnegie Mellon University. “And I’m a single investigator using no automated tools, just my eyeballs and spreadsheets.” “I’ve personally seen doctors, lawyers, dentists, contractors, wedding DJs, piano teachers, lactation consultants,” she says. ![]() Dean says that review fraud extends across every profession you can imagine. Other businesses take the matter into their own hands by offering incentivized reviews, coercing employees to write fake reviews, or otherwise influencing reviews to create a false impression. “Groups that solicit or encourage fake reviews violate our policies and are investigated and enforced upon appropriately,” a Meta spokesperson says. Dean says there’s a “tremendous amount” of review fraud being facilitated on social media. Highly-organized, largely off-shore fake review networks frequently use sites like Facebook, Craigslist, and Reddit to advertise and sell their deceptive practices to businesses. “A lot of times businesses unwittingly will hire these firms because they try to position themselves as online marketing and reputation firms,” says Brian Hoyt, TripAdvisor’s head of global communications and industry affairs. ![]() Paid-review farms have sprung up around the world, providing their services to businesses paying to falsely boost their ratings on review platforms. “If you’ve got a market where information that you think is coming from a buyer is actually coming from a seller, the market doesn’t work.” Fake reviews corrupt the market by restricting access to “free, fair, and proper information,” says Palmer. A January survey by SEO platform BrightLocal found that 77% of consumers regularly consider reviews when making a purchase and 75% say that reading a positive review is the top factor that makes them feel good about a business. It makes sense, then, that when fake review schemes come into play, studies show they can and do pay off for businesses who employ them. “Instead of picking up a product, touching it, feeling it, smelling it, they were confined to a two-dimensional screen and had to use all the tools they could to make a decision. “Many consumers had to learn what indicators they should use to make it easier to buy online, rather than going to a shop,” he says. These shoppers came to lean on reviews more heavily, says Adrian Palmer, head of Henley Business School’s department of marketing and reputation at the University of Reading. The pandemic forced a less-experienced cohort of online shoppers to do more of their purchasing on the internet. “We’re talking fake stories about people feigning various mental illnesses and claiming to be helped by the practice.” “We’re not just talking about five-star ratings,” she says. ![]() She chose a psychiatric practice based on reviews she read on Google and Yelp, but then had a very negative experience there that left her upset and extremely frustrated about being manipulated by the reviews. Cheating is rewarded in the current environment.”ĭean created Fake Review Watch after having her own harrowing ordeal five years ago. The world of online reviews is so overrun with fakes, it’s become like the Wild West, Dean says. Fake reviews influenced around $152 billion in global spending on lackluster products and services last year, according to a report from the World Economic Forum. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to supercharge global e-commerce, this kind of fraud has emerged as one of the most significant factors contributing to an erosion of consumer confidence in the online marketplace.
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