According to research, online reviews have a substantial effect on our shopping habits. For example, 83% of consumers use Google to find local business reviews, and 74% go on at least two review platforms in their business research, while 34% use three or more.
Additionally, 69% of consumers would feel positive about using a business if its written reviews describe positive experiences, and 71% would not consider using a business with an average review rating below three stars.
Knowing this, bad actors try to manipulate the numbers. The UK consumer group Which? highlighted the scale of the problem, with research showing how groups offering fake reviews continue to thrive on Facebook.
Groups on the social network with thousands of members offer free products in exchange for reviews, even despite past interventions by national regulators.
Researchers found 14 Facebook groups trading in reviews for Amazon, Google, and Trustpilot. Together, they shared more than 62,000 members between them.
The United Kingdom has been taking this problem seriously. The country's Competition and Markets Authority told Facebook to clamp down on fake reviews in 2020 and again in 2021, when the social network removed more than 16,000 groups.
Which? estimates that the groups it has reported to Facebook since 2018 have had more than 1 million members in total.
The Guardian's analysis of various pages on Facebook has also found similar schemes. It discovered 34 related to Amazon, with 56,000 members in total, and 17 groups offering fake reviews for Trustpilot, Google, or both.
In posts on Facebook, businesses are told they can buy in bulk, with 100 reviews for $180, or place smaller orders, with one review costing $2.
One broker’s advert suggests that for every one-star review a product gets, “you need five new 5-star reviews just to average out 4.5 stars. If you want to average out 5 stars, you need 15 new 5-star reviews.” They offer services to the UK and the US, among a plethora of other countries, adding that their service is manual, with no bots, and they will even upload photographs to “make it look legit.”
"Why are fake online reviews so resilient? A significant reason is that the return on investment of soliciting fake reviews makes them highly profitable," wrote brand communication expert Jonathan Marciano. "An extra star on a restaurant's Yelp rating can increase revenue by 5% to 9%. The Federal Trade Commission has shown that the outlay on fake reviews can provide a payoff times twenty."
"For instance, in an enforcement case against Legacy Learning Systems Inc., it was found that $250,000 outlay on fake reviews generated more than $5 million in sales."
