Have you ever been shopping online and found yourself wondering about the user reviews? There are some that seem natural enough – if you ordered a child’s wading pool, and it turned out to be the size of a soup bowl, you’d probably be peeved enough to leave a negative review. By the same token, if you ordered a bottle of floor polish and discovered that it also cured athlete’s foot, waterproofed your boots, recovered lost data from your hard drive, killed mildew in your shower, healed minor cuts and bruises, and make a satisfying mid-morning snack – all at once – you might be moved to write in and extol the virtues of this wonderful product. But if you spend any time reading such reviews, you will also find huge numbers of them that go on for far too many words about products no one could possibly care about…
If you’ve ever wondered how such reviews get posted in the first place, or, for that matter, how some truly appalling products manage to accumulate dozens (or hundreds) of five-star reviews full of superlative praise, it’s possible that you’re dealing with the owner and/or manufacturer writing fake reviews in an attempt to boost sales. There have also been cases of people buying up a product and then attempting to inflate its reputation before unloading it at a profit. But it is also possible that somebody, somewhere, has just bought and paid for those reviews – wholesale…
You can find the story on the BBC website if you want to, but the basic idea is that the consumer group that publishes the “Which?” magazine – somewhat like Consumer Reports in the US – went looking for firms offering fake product reviews, and found some that hire large numbers of free-lancers to generate unique reviews of the product. Unlike random reviews generated by expert systems, or bots, or those created by cutting and pasting pre-written passages repeatedly, reviews of this type are almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing – precisely because they are written by real users, without a script to follow. What makes these fake reviews so problematic, though, is that they are available in large numbers at a discount…
Consider, for example, one offer that the folks at “Which?” turned up, with a bulk order of 1,000 fake reviews for just £8,000 (about $11,400 USD as of this writing). That might be beyond the means of a small start-up company, but it’s cheaper than most television ads cost to make, and competitive with what having your ad run on a local television station. Moreover, the fake reviews can remain up indefinitely, while a broadcast channel or streaming service will charge you for every time you ad is viewed. If your fake reviews are believable, they could go on generating new sales for years into the future, and even if nobody actually reads them, the positive impact of a thousand 5-out-of-5 reviews will dramatically improve your aggregate product rating. Best of all, it will be almost impossible to sue you for false advertising or prosecute you for fraud…
Now, I will admit that I have no idea how many people out there still believe everything they read on the Internet – although, if the events of the last year are any indicator, there do appear to be a lot of them. And I suppose that it could be argued that if the worst thing that ever happens to you in e-commerce is that the combination floor polish, water seal, data-recovery, mildew-killer, antiseptic, and snack food product that you bought because of all of the glowing reviews turns out to be useless in any of those functions, you are still a very fortunate person. Just remember that no matter how legitimate someone’s user reviews look, there is somebody out there who is offering to get them for you wholesale – and plan accordingly…
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