How Do You Decide on a Product Amidst Fake Reviews

False reviews hurt consumers and businesses. Let's come across how you tin can spot them – or, improve still, prevent them from existence written in the first place.

False Reviews – The Scale of the Problem

Online reviews have been a truthful revolution in the way nosotros purchase products and services. According to statistics compiled by Invesp, 93% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions. But 72% of interrogated people also believe that faux reviews have go a norm of the manufacture.

They're non far off. Review sites such as Capterra, TrustPilot, or Google Reviews are littered with low-quality or plainly fraudulent reviews.

Official reports from the World Economic Forum states that the rate of false to real reviews hovers around the 4% mark. A report by the Guardian calculated that three.six% of all reviews on Tripadvisor were fraudulent.

How False Reviews Negatively Impact Businesses

Hither's why imitation reviews cause a problem for online businesses:

Fake reviews mislead consumers
Hosting fake reviews on your site creates a loss of consumer trust
Imitation reviews on your site hurt your brand reputation
Vetting fake reviews is time-consuming and expensive

It'south also increasingly a compliance issue. In the United states, for instance, the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 aims to crevice down on faux reviews. Similarly, the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland government is deploying mediation and mediation processes, which include auditing website reviews.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the UK's business organization secretary stated that:

"The UK's economic recovery relies on the strength of our open markets and consumers' faith in them. Past delivering on our commitment to bolster our contest authorities, we're giving businesses conviction that they're competing on off-white terms and the public confidence they're getting a good deal."

How Fraudsters Benefit from Fake Reviews

Ane reason imitation reviews are and so commonplace is that there are a lot of incentives. Firstly, you could be selling them directly to unscrupulous businesses. There is no shortage of online services that offer to create fake reviews for you (for a cost).

Fraudsters, meanwhile, will also employ the same tactics to requite credibility to their own products or services. Fake reviews may influence unsuspecting consumers, who end up:

Giving away their credit menu data to phishing websites
Purchasing faux or low-quality replicas of products
Shooting down the competition to boost their own products or services

All of the in a higher place conspires to create an surround of mistrust for your users, which, in turn, reflects poorly on your own reputation.

5 Ways to Spot Faux Reviews

While most review sites have a filter in place to find imitation online reviews, sometimes it's up to yous to perform due diligence. Hither are tips on spotting fake reviews:

Check the user's profile: if you can go information near the person who posted the review, you lot may be able to identify cherry-red flags, such every bit a big number of positive reviews for the same product, lack of social activity, or re-create-pasted comments. Fifty-fifty more specific: comparing their review with that of another reviewer will give yous a better idea of what kind of person you're dealing with.
Lack of specifics: fake reviews are ofttimes hastily written, which is why you'll discover vague descriptions or a lack of specific details in them.
Repeat brand mentions: reviews that mention the production proper noun several times and have a marketing-y experience to them could be merely that: written by marketers, not consumers.
Consider the wording: not only unusual language or grammatical mistakes which could betoken to outsourced simulated review services – y'all should also look for similarities between reviews in terms of structure and wording.
Employ specific online tools: there is a growing marketplace for fake review checks. Tools such as ReviewMeta, Fakespot, or TheReviewIndex automatically scan a product folio's reviews and eliminate simulated ones to give you a more accurate picture.

Of course, the best mode to remove simulated reviews from your site is to prevent them from being written in the get-go place.

The good news is that you volition probably have some kind of sign-upwards process designed to let users create an account earlier they tin can review an item or service.

You lot tin use the signup data to screen suspicious users earlier they even go a gamble to write a review. Yous decide what is deemed suspicious, and gear up monitoring alerts, which permit your squad know immediately when something looks wrong.

Identifying suspicious accounts

One of the best means to flag spammy and depression-endeavor accounts is to look at a user's alternative data. For instance, you could check the email address or telephone number they give to answer the following questions:

Are they using a temporary email accost service?
Does the phone number come from a virtual SIM carte?
Does their email provider enquire for 2FA or not?
Are the email address or phone number linked to any social media profiles?

By gathering all that information, you tin gain a fairly good idea of whether y'all're dealing with a good reviewer or not.

Read more about opposite email lookup and reverse phone lookup.

So at that place's the information that's built into the user's connexion. This can answer questions such as:

Are they using a VPN, proxy, or Tor node to connect?
Are they spoofing their hardware or software configuration?
Is the IP address pointing to a suspicious location?

Read more about device fingerprinting and IP fraud scores here.

Spotting Connections Between Users

Another way to block suspicious user reviews is to identify what is known as multi-accounting. Put but, it points to the aforementioned user logging in under different personas. It's non always lucent fraud (for instance, it could be different family members sharing a reckoner), but the well-nigh likely scenario is that you're dealing with an organized group of fraudsters.

So how exercise you lot spot these fraud rings? Using the aforementioned tools mentioned to a higher place to reply the following questions:

Are multiple accounts sharing the aforementioned IP?
Do they share similar device configurations?
Do their email addresses follow like naming schemes (e.k. john765, john778, etc.)?

Over again, this doesn't always point to fraud. But the picture should become clearer if you also expect at the account owners' behavior on your site.

Analyzing User Beliefs

If yous can log information relating to user actions, you tin can create run a risk rules designed to answer specific questions.

How long do users spend on the platform before leaving a review?
What is their ratio of reviews to purchases?
Do they ask for a refund after leaving a review?
What kind of language practice they use in their reviews?
What kind of browser or device are they using to access the site? Is it likely to be an automatic workflow, or legitimate user interactions?

There are specific tools you tin can use to clarify user beliefs. In fraud prevention, a common solution is to deploy velocity rules, which look at user deportment over a set time frame (eastward.g. how frequently to they leave a review afterward logging in).

The language analysis is a bit more complex. You will demand to deploy specific Tongue Processing tools (NLP), which are increasingly available via a SaaS model, for instance with companies such as MonkeyLearn or Aylien.

How SEON Can Assistance Reduce Faux Reviews

At SEON, we offer all the fraud detection tools you lot may need to identify suspicious users and spot connections between accounts. Nosotros besides analyze user behavior and create automatic alerts to let you know when something looks off. This means you tin filter out bad users earlier they exit false reviews on your site.

Best of all, we cater to a wide range of needs, from elementary risk scoring to the near sophisticated machine learning dominion suggestions – to increase the accuracy of your fraud detection over fourth dimension.

Frequently Asked Questions about Fake Reviews

Are simulated reviews illegal?

Yep. Writing a fake review is considered to promote unfair trading, which falls nether consumer protection laws.

How to spot a fake review hands?

The easiest fashion to spot a fake review is to look at the poster'south account details and to expect for similar reviews written in the same style. Yous may be looking at organized groups paid to write reviews, which is why the language will be similar.

Sources:

The Guardian: 3.half-dozen% of all Tripadvisor reviews were fake in 2020
EandT: United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland regime plans crackdown on fake reviews
Earth Economic Forum: faux online reviews toll $152B a year
Ivesp: 93% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions

Bence Jendruszak

COO

Bence is the co-founder and COO of SEON whose vision is to create a safer online environment for merchants in loftier gamble verticals.

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