September 25, 2013
Bogus Reviewers Do The Crime, Pay the Fine
More than half of respondents in a July RetailWire poll said online reviews would become more important in consumer purchasing decisions over the next decade. As reviews grow in importance, the number of phony ones has grown as well. Gartner estimates that 10 to 15 percent of reviews will be phony by next year.
A 2009 FTC ruling established that paying for a positive review constitutes deceptive advertising if the company that hires the reviewer fails to disclose that information. New York’s Attorney General office recently sued 19 firms for more than $350,000 in fines for posting phony reviews that violated that state’s laws against false advertising.
The practice of posting phony reviews, also known as "Astroturfing", has become a big business. According to the NY AG’s "Operation Clean Turf" investigation, the firms paid freelance writers from the Philippines, Bangladesh and Eastern Europe $1 to $10 for each review they wrote.
"Consumers rely on reviews from their peers to make daily purchasing decisions on anything from food and clothing to recreation and sightseeing," New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement. "This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit across the internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution. And companies that continue to engage in these practices should take note: ‘Astroturfing’ is the 21st century’s version of false advertising, and prosecutors have many tools at their disposal to put an end to it."
A good review on a site such as Yelp can generate sales for companies. USA Today cited research by a Harvard Business School assistant professor, Michael Luca, which found a one-star increase in a Yelp rating can lead to a five to nine percent jump in revenue for a company.
- A.G. Schneiderman Announces Agreement With 19 Companies To Stop Writing Fake Online Reviews And Pay More Than $350,000 In Fines – Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman
- Will Customer Reviews Become a Bigger Influencer of Retail Purchases? – RetailWire
- Gartner: Fake Online Reviews Becoming a Bigger Problem – RetailWire
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Do you expect crack downs on fake reviews in the U.S. to be effective? Do you see these revelations of fake reviews as undermining consumers’ faith in legitimate critiques?
Poll
I expect any crackdowns on bogus reviews to be only marginally effective due to the difficulty of tracking them and the increasing number of reviews to help determine purchases. Smart consumers will utilize more than one source, including word of mouth, to make future decisions and will view online reviews with some skepticism because they know a decent percentage of those reviews can be fake. People have always believed only a portion of what they read; online reviews are no different.
What exactly is a “fake review?” Obviously when you pay a total stranger to make up positive comments about a product or book they’ve never even seen – it’s fake.
I’d bet 50% to 80% of all glowingly positive book reviews are written by friends of the author regardless of whether they actually liked or even read the book or not. That author, of course, returns the favor to his/her writer friends. Are those fake too? I’d say yes indeed they are, but the FTC won’t flag them. I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked for a book endorsement where the author actually gave me a suggestion as to what to say and didn’t expect that I’d actually want to read the thing. If I think a book is a total waste of time and money, I usually write “This book is in a league of its own!” I accidentally leave out the word ‘minor’.
Finally, the article doesn’t address ‘negative’ fake reviews. There are lots of those too. The concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘honesty’ could be headed to the museum.
I don’t look at the good reviews. Let the buyer beware. I look at the bad ones. No one is going to pay to have a bad review for their business. When those bad reviews start piling up, then I take notice. I don’t expect any crackdown on fake reviews because there is no way to police it.
I hope the crackdown continues and becomes an ongoing fight against deceptive advertising. I am not sure how long it will take for companies to get around this by using overseas sources.
Consumers are skeptical of reviews to begin with. As years pass, shoppers can begin to distinguish what seems truthful and what seems to be “made up.” Or maybe that’s just me.
I review the reviews to find what I consider to be personally relevant. I look for reactions to characteristics that I deem important and judge how reactions are worded along with their particular meaning. And if there are only a few reviews, I assume there is no review worth reading.
I expect crackdowns on fake reviews to generate greater awareness of this behavior among consumers. That awareness will make shoppers more wary and perhaps institute their own set of criteria for accepting reviews. But I don’t expect fake reviews to stop, especially when owners can solicit the help of their friends and family. Maybe the overseas operations will be reduced, but I’m skeptical.
How can this be prevented, or at least short circuited, when the IRS told my wife it will take at least six months to determine who (or if they can even find) the persons who stole her identity and filed a bogus tax return are? They were paid, and we are the ones left with the problem. I can’t imagine how it will be possible to determine who is at fault and “fine” them for writing bogus reviews. There is really no serious victim. So why will they utilize manpower they can’t afford to pay to investigate it?
I don’t see the government being effective in controlling fake review as the volume is just too massive. I have a difficult time believing some of the glowing reviews and the overly-critical reviews, sometimes of the smallest of items. Paid and curated product review services in the mold of Angie’s List may become even more popular as a way to tell the difference between product review fact and fiction.
“The firms paid freelance writers from the Philippines, Bangladesh and Eastern Europe $1 to $10 for each review they wrote.”
This is truly appalling! We have thousands of unemployed recent graduates right here in the U.S., and yet, apparently, even criminal activity has to be outsourced. As for the more basic issue, I share the pessimism of the other commenters here: it’s hard for crackdowns to be effective when they’re infrequent and few people even know about them. And even if we were to somehow eliminate every fraudulent review out there, we’re still faced with the fact that a whole lot of “legitimate” reviews are almost as useless.
I think most people have learned to read between the lines (although one of us, it seems, hasn’t yet realized that while no one would pay for a bad review, their competitors might).
Is it really a crime? It’s misleading and frustrating, however, I’m not certain doing something that is bad necessarily makes it punishable or even enforceable. I suppose this can be construed as false advertising. If that is proven in a court, then perhaps laws could be drafted.
There outta be a law… But on the World Wild Web there are few effective legal sanctions I could imagine. False advertising, maybe, but try to prove that.
Phony reviews are apparently crowd-sourced among starving writers. And they don’t all come from the Philippines. I can infer by monitoring the comment spam on blogs I manage that there is a worldwide industry of content fakers out there who work for pennies a pop, copying and pasting. Let’s face it, we can all spot a few ringers when we check out product sites too.
So I would propose a public shaming strategy instead. Some clever web-scrapers should build a liars’ index that monitors and rates site reviews. I’d bet they could concoct an algorithm that does this empirically by detecting content cues, word combinations, etc.
If a product site (or search result) is shown to be stacked with baloney, then its reviews should be labeled as untrustworthy. Then the brands will be motivated put the screws to their SEO consultants and disabuse them of cheesy content marketing practices.
I’m hitching my wagon to Ian Percy’s comment regarding “‘negative’ fake reviews” in his third paragraph on this topic. Contrary to others’ comments that: “I don’t look at the good reviews. I look at the bad ones. No one is going to pay to have a bad review for their business,” I demur. Without a quantified reference to point to, but with a great deal of intercourse with other people in my industry (e-commerce), I believe that the bulk of the subterranean bidness of paid-for reviews are negative comments posted on competitors’ websites and elsewhere. Like with politics, competition eventually devolves to negative campaigning.
With my bidness, I do everything in my power to hunt down the authors of negative comments about my products and expose them online, including publishing their personal information when I have it. I am ruthless. That’s my version of a crackdown. “Public shaming,” according to Jim Tenser. Thanks for the term.
Consumers have trusted online review sites, but they are learning that the flawed system has fake reviews. There will be a tipping point where the online review sites become irrelevant unless they create a system to prevent fraud. That said, word-of-mouth on sites where there are connections with other consumers (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), will take over. We trust our friends more than anyone.
No. Fake reviews are a serious online problem that require online verification substantiation before allowing an online review to be posted. Chasing a false review is not the way to fix the problem. Stopping these false reviews from being posted in the first place will certainly help.
I certainly think it is a laudable objective to eliminate fake reviews. That said, I do expect it to be challenging to do. As someone who shops online frequently, I take reviews as a guideline, but do not have complete faith in them. It would definitely increase my confidence in a product if I could be sure that a site was free of fake reviews. As Jack Welch used to say, people don’t do what you expect, they do what you inspect. Some level of auditing of reviews with severe punishments for offenders might be a step in the right direction.
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I expect any crackdowns on bogus reviews to be only marginally effective due to the difficulty of tracking them and the increasing number of reviews to help determine purchases. Smart consumers will utilize more than one source, including word of mouth, to make future decisions and will view online reviews with some skepticism because they know a decent percentage of those reviews can be fake. People have always believed only a portion of what they read; online reviews are no different.
What exactly is a “fake review?” Obviously when you pay a total stranger to make up positive comments about a product or book they’ve never even seen – it’s fake.
I’d bet 50% to 80% of all glowingly positive book reviews are written by friends of the author regardless of whether they actually liked or even read the book or not. That author, of course, returns the favor to his/her writer friends. Are those fake too? I’d say yes indeed they are, but the FTC won’t flag them. I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked for a book endorsement where the author actually gave me a suggestion as to what to say and didn’t expect that I’d actually want to read the thing. If I think a book is a total waste of time and money, I usually write “This book is in a league of its own!” I accidentally leave out the word ‘minor’.
Finally, the article doesn’t address ‘negative’ fake reviews. There are lots of those too. The concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘honesty’ could be headed to the museum.
I don’t look at the good reviews. Let the buyer beware. I look at the bad ones. No one is going to pay to have a bad review for their business. When those bad reviews start piling up, then I take notice. I don’t expect any crackdown on fake reviews because there is no way to police it.
I hope the crackdown continues and becomes an ongoing fight against deceptive advertising. I am not sure how long it will take for companies to get around this by using overseas sources.
Consumers are skeptical of reviews to begin with. As years pass, shoppers can begin to distinguish what seems truthful and what seems to be “made up.” Or maybe that’s just me.
I review the reviews to find what I consider to be personally relevant. I look for reactions to characteristics that I deem important and judge how reactions are worded along with their particular meaning. And if there are only a few reviews, I assume there is no review worth reading.
I expect crackdowns on fake reviews to generate greater awareness of this behavior among consumers. That awareness will make shoppers more wary and perhaps institute their own set of criteria for accepting reviews. But I don’t expect fake reviews to stop, especially when owners can solicit the help of their friends and family. Maybe the overseas operations will be reduced, but I’m skeptical.
How can this be prevented, or at least short circuited, when the IRS told my wife it will take at least six months to determine who (or if they can even find) the persons who stole her identity and filed a bogus tax return are? They were paid, and we are the ones left with the problem. I can’t imagine how it will be possible to determine who is at fault and “fine” them for writing bogus reviews. There is really no serious victim. So why will they utilize manpower they can’t afford to pay to investigate it?
I don’t see the government being effective in controlling fake review as the volume is just too massive. I have a difficult time believing some of the glowing reviews and the overly-critical reviews, sometimes of the smallest of items. Paid and curated product review services in the mold of Angie’s List may become even more popular as a way to tell the difference between product review fact and fiction.
“The firms paid freelance writers from the Philippines, Bangladesh and Eastern Europe $1 to $10 for each review they wrote.”
This is truly appalling! We have thousands of unemployed recent graduates right here in the U.S., and yet, apparently, even criminal activity has to be outsourced. As for the more basic issue, I share the pessimism of the other commenters here: it’s hard for crackdowns to be effective when they’re infrequent and few people even know about them. And even if we were to somehow eliminate every fraudulent review out there, we’re still faced with the fact that a whole lot of “legitimate” reviews are almost as useless.
I think most people have learned to read between the lines (although one of us, it seems, hasn’t yet realized that while no one would pay for a bad review, their competitors might).
Is it really a crime? It’s misleading and frustrating, however, I’m not certain doing something that is bad necessarily makes it punishable or even enforceable. I suppose this can be construed as false advertising. If that is proven in a court, then perhaps laws could be drafted.
There outta be a law… But on the World Wild Web there are few effective legal sanctions I could imagine. False advertising, maybe, but try to prove that.
Phony reviews are apparently crowd-sourced among starving writers. And they don’t all come from the Philippines. I can infer by monitoring the comment spam on blogs I manage that there is a worldwide industry of content fakers out there who work for pennies a pop, copying and pasting. Let’s face it, we can all spot a few ringers when we check out product sites too.
So I would propose a public shaming strategy instead. Some clever web-scrapers should build a liars’ index that monitors and rates site reviews. I’d bet they could concoct an algorithm that does this empirically by detecting content cues, word combinations, etc.
If a product site (or search result) is shown to be stacked with baloney, then its reviews should be labeled as untrustworthy. Then the brands will be motivated put the screws to their SEO consultants and disabuse them of cheesy content marketing practices.
I’m hitching my wagon to Ian Percy’s comment regarding “‘negative’ fake reviews” in his third paragraph on this topic. Contrary to others’ comments that: “I don’t look at the good reviews. I look at the bad ones. No one is going to pay to have a bad review for their business,” I demur. Without a quantified reference to point to, but with a great deal of intercourse with other people in my industry (e-commerce), I believe that the bulk of the subterranean bidness of paid-for reviews are negative comments posted on competitors’ websites and elsewhere. Like with politics, competition eventually devolves to negative campaigning.
With my bidness, I do everything in my power to hunt down the authors of negative comments about my products and expose them online, including publishing their personal information when I have it. I am ruthless. That’s my version of a crackdown. “Public shaming,” according to Jim Tenser. Thanks for the term.
Consumers have trusted online review sites, but they are learning that the flawed system has fake reviews. There will be a tipping point where the online review sites become irrelevant unless they create a system to prevent fraud. That said, word-of-mouth on sites where there are connections with other consumers (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), will take over. We trust our friends more than anyone.
No. Fake reviews are a serious online problem that require online verification substantiation before allowing an online review to be posted. Chasing a false review is not the way to fix the problem. Stopping these false reviews from being posted in the first place will certainly help.
I certainly think it is a laudable objective to eliminate fake reviews. That said, I do expect it to be challenging to do. As someone who shops online frequently, I take reviews as a guideline, but do not have complete faith in them. It would definitely increase my confidence in a product if I could be sure that a site was free of fake reviews. As Jack Welch used to say, people don’t do what you expect, they do what you inspect. Some level of auditing of reviews with severe punishments for offenders might be a step in the right direction.