Online reviews are on every consumer site these days. But it turns out often times these ratings and reviews are fake.
According to former Amazon employee Chris McCabe, who evaluated seller performance while employed for the tech giant and who currently operates a consulting firm for its retailers, the number of fake reviews on Amazon is about 30 percent. Amazon, on the other hand, estimates it at less than 1 percent. The company says it spent more than $400 million in 2018 alone to protect customers from reviews abuse, fraud, and misconduct.
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Amazon isn’t alone in having a problem with fake reviews. TripAdvisor revealed recently that its review analysis system rejected 1.4 million review submissions out of 66 million because they were suspicious.
“Unfortunately, reviews are the only way for us to gauge if a seller or product or business is actually of good quality,” Saoud Khalifah, CEO of Fakespot, told The Wall Street Journal. “You can’t physically touch it, you can’t physically judge it, so you need the opinions of others.”
Just earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission announced a major lawsuit against a company it says paid for fake Amazon reviews.
Fake reviews are everywhere. According to an NBC News investigation, there are thousands of possibly fake reviews on Amazon, Yelp, Facebook, and Google. The investigation also proved how easy it is to purchase hundreds of positive reviews.
There are ways to spot fake reviews. Look for typos or broken English as many fake reviewers are actually based in foreign countries. If there is a sudden rash of positive reviews this could be a sign that “the business a consumer is researching has recently paid for positive influence,” NBC News reported. Another sign of fake reviews is if there are positive reviews posted only from certain countries.
