Online reviews are increasingly fake, say researchers. Here's why, and how to spot them
Many are written for pay, says former U.S. federal investigator
We turn to online reviews to help with everything from shopping for shoes to finding a dentist.
But a former U.S. federal criminal investigator says so many reviews are fake — written by people paid to post — that she no longer believes anyone should rely on them.
"My recommendation to everyone is actually get back to the tried-and-true method of getting your information from real people, because you just don't know," Kay Dean, now a consumer advocate, told The Current host Matt Galloway.
Dean, who has spent more than five years investigating the issue and runs a YouTube channel called Fake Review Watch, said she's seen fake reviews "across every profession you can imagine, from law firms to surgeons, piano teachers, wedding DJs, lactation consultants — you name it."
Sometimes the fakes are facilitated by brokers or marketing companies who have numerous businesses as their clients, she says.
Or, if a business wants to save money, it "just gets on social media and barters and trades reviews with other businesses."
CBC News reached out to one reviewer whose profile Dean provided as an example of someone who posted fake reviews and eventually had their Yelp account removed. CBC News agreed to withhold the reviewer's name because she fears losing her job.
She said she first learned about writing reviews for pay through a message in her Instagram DMs in 2018, and wrote them for two years.
"I was approached by just a random account. I don't even think they were based in Canada or the U.S. based on their level of English," the reviewer said. "They asked me if I would be able to write some reviews for some different businesses and restaurants, mainly."
She says she was specifically asked to use her Yelp Elite account. Yelp Elite status is awarded to people who have posted frequently on the site, and their reviews — signified by a badge next to their name — tend to appear higher than ordinary reviews, making their visibility valuable to businesses seeking to raise their star-ratings on the platform.
The businesses were often nowhere near her home in Toronto, she said.
"They were significantly far. A lot of the time the reviews were actually crafted for me but I could tweak them as I wished. So I would say, 'Oh, while visiting San Francisco on a business trip I went and got my nails done at so-and-so salon,'" the reviewer said.
Over time she was approached by multiple Instagram profiles representing clients, and in one case she says she was asked to review a personal injury law firm.
"I was basically asked to talk about how they were able to resolve my legal case…. It was about how great the legal team was and how they were able to listen to my concerns and all of that."
She said she does not feel guilty for posting fake reviews, "mainly because I wasn't writing anything negative. It was all positive."
Also, she needed the money, which would arrive by PayPal, she said; between $30 and $100 US.
"It was good money and, at the time, I didn't have a full-time job. I was financially struggling, kind of trying to make money here and there. And this was definitely a good way to go at it because it really required almost minimal effort."
Besides, fake reviews are "everywhere," she said.
"I see so many restaurants offering a certain percentage off your bill if you're able to provide them with a Google review. Or a free item. So, thinking about it that way didn't make me feel too bad about it, because everyone's kind of doing it."
Severe consequences
On the other side of the coin, fake negative reviews can "be weaponized" to target the competition or extort cash from businesses in exchange for deleting the reviews.
Wayne Ritchur says his company was targeted this way. He co-owns Riverbend Movers in Winnipeg and says he believes it was one or more competitors that were behind around 100 negative Google reviews that appeared on its business profile.
"The reviews said just ridiculous things, like, things that would not be true, just obviously made-up stuff just to try to make you look bad," said Ritchur. "One of them was, 'Wayne stole my wife's panties from her drawers,' and that's — I don't even go on jobs so that would be absolutely impossible."
Eventually the company got Google to remove the reviews.
Dean says she often hears from businesses whose profiles have been flooded with fake negative reviews. "The common complaint is the difficulty in navigating the situation with the tech companies, for example, Google — it's a black hole," she said. "It can be very, very time consuming."
Asked how it handles fake reviews, Google said in a statement it takes "swift action ranging from content removal to account suspension, even litigation."
Yelp, also in a statement, said in part, that it "strictly prohibits offering incentives or compensation in exchange for reviews."
Yelp has "extensive measures in place to mitigate this type of deceptive behaviour on our platform," it said. Yelp also said it "conducts proactive investigations to report suspicious groups where this type of activity originates."
Spotting the fakes
Dean says spotting fake reviews isn't a straightforward process.
"You just can't look at a review in isolation and say that it's fake," she said, though some fake reviews have a lot of detail and the same photos that were provided to the authors.
It's a pattern of reviews that's more telling, said Dean. "It just becomes not believable that this Yelp Elite and for example, six others, reviewed the same law firm in Toronto and the same moving company in Florida and the same dentist in Texas."
Shreyas Sekar is an assistant professor of operations management at University of Toronto Scarborough who researches data-driven decisions on digital marketplaces.
He says people have become reliant on reviews because, on platforms like Amazon, they're presented with so much choice they can't possibly wade through all the options. Zeroing in on products with large numbers of positive reviews helps narrow the field.
But putting a stop to fake reviews may only get more challenging.
"I would suspect that a lot of fake reviews are going to be written by AI very soon, if [they're not] not already," Sekar said.
Amazon said in a statement that 99 per cent of its products "contain only authentic reviews." The company said it removed over 200 million reviews it deemed fake in 2022 alone.
Sekar says one recent study estimated that Amazon takes around 100 days to take down a fake review. "Clearly they are doing something. I think the big question is, are they doing enough? And the answer seems to be that it's not enough because by the time the fake reviews go off, the damage is already done."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Produced by Emma Posca