A warning by Trustpilot that it will sue cheats who habitually post fake reviews has been greeted with scepticism, not least because the site seems unable to spot and stop the most obvious scams.
Take bitcoindoubler.eu, which claims to have an algorithm that will “Double Your Bitcoin In Just 24 Hours”.
Quite apart from the implausibility of that claim, there’s the company name and number that it uses.
It takes just a few seconds on the Companies House website to discover that this belongs to a company dissolved in August 2019.
Its Trustpilot page was set up last month and quickly gathered five star reviews, beginning with Julian dave (sic), who posted: “Legit, legit, legit…first I was in doubt to use it because of some negative reviews here.”
Yet there were no other reviews when Julian dave posted on January 18.
Another five star review is from someone called Jessica Vayn, who says: “100% legit - I recommend this site to everyone.”
Jessica Vayn’s profile picture has been lifted from a publicity shot of American actress Jessica Camacho.
Another reviewer has got confused about which site he’s supposed to be praising, writing: “Most trusted site ever…btc-doubler.biz is legit.”
Btc-doubler.biz has a separate entry on Trustpilot with its own doubtful reviews, including another person praising a wrong site, writing: “There were a lot of investing platforms out there but nothing comes close to Bitcoin Victory!”.
Bitcoin-victory.net, bitcoin-rejoin.net and bitcoin.com all carry the same promise of “insane profits” and the same endorsements – so a Sebastian T. Thorpe from London has apparently made precisely £20,941 from all of them.
None of these sites give any corporate information about their owners and cannot be reached through the contact numbers listed on Trustpilot. Despite all these red flags they’re on the platform with dozens of five-star reviews. And these reviews come almost exclusively from people who have never posted a review before.
Then there’s cryptoarbitrage.vip - “Deposit your bitcoin with us and double your investment in no time!”.
Its Trustpilot page shows 90% five star reviews.
One wrote, in the barely literate way of so many fake reviews: “I'm a true fan of cryptoarbitrage that how they are keeping everything in the flow.”
Cryptoarbitrage.vip, which is now offline, used the registration number of a company shut down two before it set up its Trustpilot profile.
The platform, home to comments on more than 626,000 domains, said in 2020 it removed more than 2.2 million fake reviews.
Now it says that it will take legal action against repeat offenders, seeking damages and orders blocking them from soliciting fake reviews.
“Consumers rely heavily on reviews to make more informed and confident purchasing decisions each and every day,” said Carolyn Jameson, its Chief Trust Officer.
“Protecting and promoting trust is fundamental to Trustpilot’s mission.
“Whilst the vast majority of businesses use reviews constructively to help get them closer to their customers, we’re prepared to do everything within our power to clamp down on the small minority who do not behave as they should, and instead use fake and misleading reviews to take advantage of consumers - often those consumers who are particularly vulnerable.”
That did not impress UK property review site, allAgents.co.uk, which this week called for Trustpilot chief executive Peter Muhlmann to resign over “the fake reviews scandal”.
It accused Muhlmann of “turning a blind eye for years to businesses posting their own positive write-ups”.
Chris Emmins, founder of Kwikchex online investigation and verification service, called for companies to be vetted before being allowed onto the platform, particularly if they operate in notorious areas such as crypto investments where fake positive reviews are used to lure in and scam victims.
“It will cost Trustpilot more but it’s the only way to stop the fakes,” he said.
“The corrupted information going on their site at the moment is absolutely staggering.
“Every time we take a look, we find examples that should be really easy to spot.
“We can find fake reviews in minutes so there’s no way Trustpilot should not be picking them up.”
investigate@mirror.co.uk
