People increasingly turn to the Internet for consumer reviews before they buy, and companies are all too aware of this trend. To make sure that potential customers see plenty of positive reviews, companies large and small have resorted to paying people to write positive reviews of their products.
Fake product reviews are now so pervasive that specialized software has been created to detect which reviews are real and which are written by ordinary consumers without any compensation. Researchers from Cornell found that certain word usage statistics made it possible for their software to detect which reviews were real and which were paid-for fakes. The software has a 90 percent accuracy rate.
Companies Guilty of Paying for Positive Product Reviews
While several companies have been found to use paid reviews to stack the deck against the competition, many more continue this practice without detection. Companies of every size use freelance bidding sites such as Elance, Mechanical Turk and vWorker to hire freelancers to write these positive reviews in batches.
The buying and selling of reviews for Amazon.com is particularly prevalent, but sites like iTunes, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla and TripAdvisor have also been victims of fake reviews. When TripAdvisor became aware of fake hotel reviews, the company began penalizing the hotels that were paying marketing companies to write them.
A few of the companies have been guilty of buying fake positive reviews:
Various authors
Fake Sponsored Blog Posts
Many of the sponsored blog post sites allow clients to post requests for positive reviews, and those that don't allow them still allow clients to give a low rating to review writers who post negative reviews. This can put pressure on bloggers to post positive sponsored posts to keep their ratings high with the posting companies in order to keep access to higher-paying posts.
The Legal Risk of Faking Reviews
Posting fake reviews is illegal in the United States and the European Union. Asking affiliates to post fake reviews of the products they sell is also illegal. One company was recently fined $250,000 for doing so.
Generally, it has been the company paying for the reviews that have been prosecuted and slapped with fines, but there is little to keep the writers themselves from being charged with fraud. Writers are cautioned against projects from clients asking for fake positive reviews. When reading reviews, experts recommend looking at an overall trend of reviews rather than relying on one or two very positive reviews of a product.
Lizz Shepherd - I am a freelance writer specializing, for now, in Web writing. The Web is an enormous place and I have been carving out my own little ...
