Customers easy prey to brisk trade in fake reviews
Study exposes failure by online giants to vet bogus opinions of consumer items
WHENEVER we buy something online, it’s handy to check out reviews posted by other consumers. But it is becoming increasingly hard to find reviews that are genuine in the murky world of online marketplaces where they are generated by the thousand and bought and sold for ‘a fiver’.
A new investigation by consumer group Which? found 10 websites selling fake reviews for as little as that.
The tell-tale signs of fake reviews are: unknown brands; low prices; excessive praise; simultaneous multiple postings and even cut-andpaste reviews that are clearly about different products!
‘Our latest investigation into fake and misleading reviews has revealed a web of paid-for “reviewers” manipulating the star ratings of nearly 50 Google business listings,’ Which? said.
It exposed ‘concerning gaps in Google’s monitoring of its review platform, potentially leaving people at risk of being misled into using local businesses that aren’t up to scratch, or that they wouldn’t have chosen otherwise’.
Honest companies may even find themselves forced out of business as unscrupulous rivals rack up hundreds of glowing reviews that make their own look bad in comparison.
A previous Which? investigation found that five top-rated headphones had almost 5,500 unverified reviews with hundreds of five-star ratings arriving about the same product in the same day.
Adam French of Which? said: ‘Fake and incentivised reviews have become a highly profitable global industry. Unscrupulous firms are finding it far too easy to game the system on popular websites, including Amazon.
‘With online reviews influencing more than £20billion a year in transactions in the UK alone, it is vital that consumers are not being misled, so the world’s biggest websites must do more to crack down on fakers.’
Which? said it shared its findings with Google which said that it uses ‘automated detection systems that scan millions of reviews each day to detect and remove content that violates its policies, and that this is applied to every review before it’s published’.
However, the operators that churn out these reviews continue doing so despite being exposed more than once. A Daily Mail investigation in December 2019 found glowing appraisals being sold by one of the same rogue marketing firms high‘We lighted in the Which? investigation.
An employee of German-based AMZTigers told a Mail reporter posing as a potential client: ‘It is 15 euros per review but much cheaper when you buy a package. It’s not really legal but it’s not really unlegal [sic]. So it’s like in a grey zone.’
She admitted the company had faced legal action from Amazon, which had deleted some reviews.
Amazon told the Daily Mail then that it has a ‘zero tolerance policy for any review designed to mislead or manipulate customers’. It added: don’t allow anyone to write reviews as a form of promotion.’
Yet just over a year later, Which? also posed as a client of AMZTigers. It found a similar business model still going strong: ‘For Amazon marketplace sellers that just want reviews, AMZTigers sells them individually for around £13, or in bulk packages starting at £620 for 50 reviews going up to an eye-watering £8,000 for 1,000 reviews – showing how seriously sellers take reviews, and the investment they’re willing to make.’
This area is indeed something of ‘a grey zone’ legally – at least for marketplaces, with Amazon and Google sheltering, as usual, under article 14 of the eCommerce Directive.
This means they are not legally responsible for unlawful material they host unless they were told of its existence and failed to act quickly to remove it.
This gets the tech giants off the hook for many unethical practices taking place on their platforms such as posting fake news and reviews, advertising scams and fraudulent activities and even selling illegal goods and services online, as we have highlighted on these pages.
It explains why they are so quick to take down ads and posts from bad actors yet freely earn billions from the ridiculous number they allow up in the first place. (When we asked Google about this in a story about an Irish boy who died from inhaling narcotic substances advertised on Google, it said it took down 2.7 billion bad ads in 2019. )
It is hoped that some of these issues will be addressed in the EU’s upcoming Digital Services Act.
Companies that sell fake reviews
don’t get off the hook so easily.
Although enforcement is very poor, whenever legal action has been taken against fake reviews it has usually been successful.
In 2018, Lecce Regional Court in Southern Italy sentenced the owner of a review company, Promo Salento, to nine months in prison for writing fake TripAdvisor reviews of hotels and restaurants in return for a fee.
‘While it is not against the law for someone to receive free goods to try out, or to be paid to write or say something good about a product or service, it is against the law for a business to mislead consumers,’ explained the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.
European legislation also protects consumers against unfair commercial practices, such as bait advertising, false claims, misleading offers or aggressive practices, said the European Consumer Centre Ireland (ECCI).
An EU Directive prohibits the practice of ‘falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for the purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer’.
Any review presented by a trader as consumer feedback must genuinely reflect real consumers’ opinions or experiences.
However, the ECCI stressed: ‘There is also an onus on the consumer to take every reasonable precaution and do research about a trader, product, or service as not all commercial practices are necessarily misleading and have to be assessed caseby-case.’