Fake online reviews are being openly traded on the internet, a BBC investigation has found.
BBC 5 live Investigates was able to buy a false, five-star recommendation placed on one of the world's leading review websites, Trustpilot.
It also uncovered online forums where Amazon shoppers are offered full refunds in exchange for product reviews.
Both companies said they do not tolerate false reviews.
The popularity of online review sites mean they are increasingly relied on by both businesses and their customers, with the government's Competition and Markets Authority estimating such reviews potentially influence £23 billion of UK customer spending every year.
Maria Menelaou, whose Yorkshire Fisheries chip shop is the top-ranked fish and chip shop in Blackpool on several review sites, said the system has replaced traditional advertising.
"It brings us a lot of customers ... It really does make a difference. We don't do any kind of advertising," Mrs Menelaou said.
While three quarters of UK adults use online review websites, almost half of those believe they have seen fake reviews, according to a survey of 1500 UK residents conducted by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and shared with BBC 5 live Investigates.
Some US analysts estimate as many as half of the reviews for certain products posted on international websites such as Amazon are potentially unreliable.
"Sellers are trying to game the system and there's a lot of money on the table," said Tommy Noonan, who runs ReviewMeta, a US-based website that analyses online reviews.
"If you can rank number one for, say, bluetooth headsets and you're selling a cheap product, you can make a lot of money," he said.
'5 star is better for us'
In 2016, Amazon introduced a range of measures prohibiting what it called "incentivised reviews", where businesses offered customers free goods in exchange for positive reviews.
Mr Noonan said this effectively drove the problem underground, leading to the emergence of Facebook groups where potential Amazon customers were encouraged to buy a product and post a review in return for a full refund.
BBC 5 live Investigates identified several of these groups and, within minutes of joining, was approached with offers of full refunds on products bought on Amazon in exchange for positive reviews.
"5 star is better for us" said one person making such an offer, in an exchange of messages with the BBC. "We value our brand, will refund you as we promised ... All my company do in this way."
It was not possible to identify the people making these offers, nor contact the businesses whose products they were seeking reviews for.
"We do not permit reviews in exchange for compensation of any kind, including payment. Customers and Marketplace sellers must follow our review guidelines and those that don't will be subject to action including potential termination of their account," Amazon said in a statement.
Responding to adverts posted on eBay, the BBC was also able to purchase a false 5-star review on Trustpilot, an online review website that describes itself as "committed to being the most trusted online review community on the market".
"Dan Box is one of the most respected professionals I have dealt with. It was a pleasure doing business with him," this review said - word for word as requested by 5 live Investigates.
Trustpilot, whose platform allows anyone to post a review, said they have "a zero-tolerance policy towards any misuse".
"We have specialist software that screens reviews against 100's of data points around the clock to automatically identify and remove fakes," the company said.
In a statement, eBay said the sale of such reviews is banned from its platform "and any listings will be removed".
5 live Investigates is on BBC Radio 5 live, 29 April at 11:00 GMT - catch up on BBC iPlayer Radio.
Have you got something you want investigating? We want to hear from you. Email us.
gagscas on April 29th, 2018 at 06:02 UTC »
This issue of Fake reviews is EVERYWHERE. Two months ago, I developed a universal dark mode for the internet. It is a Free and Open source browser extension for Chrome or Firefox which automatically make every website you visit into dark mode by using a special algorithm. So, the user can browse the internet at night without straining their eyes with bright white websites.
It was launched on a reddit thread and people loved it as it was very different from all existing extensions which just inverted the color to acheived dark mode. We got like 50 five star reviews in a row. We were elighted and working on an update, but then all of a sudden, in a single day we got 300+ one star rating! We were shocked. Over the next few days we got a total of 1000+ one star rating and our overall rating came down to less than 1.45stars from 4.89stars. This caused us to lose our ranking in search engines and the webstore. Less people started installing our extension.
We noticed that at the same time, there was a new extension in the same category which got 700 five star ratings in one single day - the day it was launched. On closer inspection, we found that it contained malware as well. Also, all the extensions in the "night mode" category had received 1000s of one-star ratings in one day, but this extension was getting only five-star ratings.
We reported it to google, but they took over a week to respond, and when they did, all they did was remove that extension. So, our rating remained at the lowly 1.45 stars. The more I researched, I found that this is happening all across the chrome webstore. So, beware of installing non reputed chrome extensions. Google is not doing a good enough job at maintaing a good store.
Tl;Dr - We made a browser extension which changes all the websites into dark mode. We initially got 50+ good revieiws, but then suddenly got 1000+ one star ratings, and we lost the rankings in the chrome webstore.
mysoulishome on April 29th, 2018 at 04:35 UTC »
I’ve been trying to find the best website to buy and sell fake reviews on but the ratings of them are difficult to trust
Vihzel on April 29th, 2018 at 03:08 UTC »
I run every Amazon product I'm interested in through Fakespot and Review Meta to see how reliable the reviews are. I will also do a background check on the company who makes the product with a Google search. If Fakespot and Review Meta both indicate that there's a lot of fake reviews, and/or the company is based in China and is "un-Googlable", then it's an automatic No from me.
It has helped me really weed out the supposedly "amazing" products found on Amazon to ones that have realistic ratings and do not fake their reviews.