“Andrew” wishes he felt more guilty about writing fake reviews of Amazon products, but says if someone orders something they don’t like then they can always get it refunded. The thirtysomething computer analyst from Oklahoma is off work while he recovers from back surgery and fires off five-star ratings as he awaits appointments.
It all began with an online search for a product testing job, which led to Facebook groups, often called “Amazon reviews” or similar. There, faceless vendors or ones with stock photo avatars offered him an array of products, from headphones to cameras, promising a full refund if he bought them and left a positive review.
The job is simple and low-risk, says Andrew – a pseudonym he chose to protect his anonymity – because even if the vendor does not refund him he can always return the product and get his money back through Amazon Prime. He has built up 40 reviews through sporadic work over the past six years, making him just a small player in a huge international ecosystem of inflated scores.
On Friday, the UK consumer group Which? highlighted the scale of the problem, with research showing how groups offering fake reviews on the likes of Amazon, Google and Trustpilot continue to thrive on Facebook. That echoes the Guardian’s analysis of pages on the social media site apparently offering free products for positive feedback. It found 34 related to Amazon, with 56,000 members in total, and 17 groups offering fake reviews for Trustpilot, Google or both, with about 20,000 members.
In posts on Facebook, businesses are told they can buy in bulk, with 100 reviews for $180 (£144), 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”.
Facebook is far from the only place where people are offering to buy endorsements. Independent brokers operate on a range of platforms including Fiverr, an online marketplace for freelance services.
In the face of this widespread and long-running threat to consumer confidence, the authorities are hitting back. The UK government is tabling its long awaited digital markets, competition and consumer bill in parliament on Tuesday, which will make it illegal to pay someone to write a fake review; to offer to submit, commission or facilitate one; and to host a review without taking steps to check it is real. It follows a similar legal ban passed in Ireland last year.
Websites are also taking on the fight, including in the courts. Trustpilot won lawsuits against two companies, the property business Euro Resales and the Dental Experts, last month, accusing them of posting fake reviews. Warning disclaimers are now on their Trustpilot pages. The companies had posted at least 2,360 false reviews between them. The Dental Experts, which has since filed for insolvency, was ordered to pay £6,471.25 in damages, while Euro Resales paid £1,600. Trustpilot donated the money to Citizens Advice.
Tripadvisor’s latest transparency report, released earlier this month, lays bare the scale of the problem. The travel site says it identified and removed 1.3m fake reviews last year, with 72% caught before being posted. The removed posts included 24,521 associated with paid-review companies. Almost half of those originated from six countries: India, Russia, the US, Turkey, Italy, and Vietnam.
Andrew says his PayPal transactions suggest most of the vendors he works for are in China. He does not work with the same person for long, as after three dealings “their accounts usually go dormant”.
He adds: “I am talking to around 10 to 12 review brokers right now and each one sends a list of 100 items and there is some crossover but not much, so I have got 3,000 different item options I can pick from … Very often they will be under-reviewed products with less than 1,000 ratings. The reviews I give help bump them up the algorithm so they are more prominent.
“Because it’s coming directly from China to you … it could just be a product which costs them very little. If it gets their store in the right algorithm it can be incredibly profitable for these businesses.”
In the Facebook groups, some posts ask for reviewers from specific countries, because on certain products on Amazon are only listed for a specific region. Andrew says most of his reviews are a few sentences long but sometimes they require photos or videos, which are normally “for more expensive items”.
There are ways of telling when a review is genuine, he says. “If you see a review and it is three paragraphs long talking about the product, that is not someone getting paid … I do a few sentences, so the longer reviews are kind of clearly real.”
As review companies expand, techniques for tackling them are evolving. Trustpilot added public consumer warnings to 2,447 business profile pages for fake reviews in 2022. A total of 145,381 accounts were blocked for links to review-selling in the same year.
Despite the crackdown, Andrew says he has not seen much of a difference since he posted his first fake review six years ago, with a similar number of Facebook groups active. One thing he finds strange is that his girlfriend still puts a lot of stock in what she reads on Amazon. “I mean, I write fake reviews. If I see a review of something online, it does not really sway me.”
A spokesperson from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said: “Fraudulent and deceptive activity is not allowed on our platforms, including offering or trading fake reviews. We’ve removed the groups shared with us for violating our policies. While no enforcement is perfect, we continue to invest in new technologies and methods to protect our users from this kind of content.”
Amazon, responding to the Guardian analysis, said it was aware of most of the groups flagged and had either reported to them to Facebook or found insufficient evidence for further action.
A spokesperson said: “When we detect fake reviews, we remove them and take appropriate action against those responsible, including through litigation in the UK and abroad. Last year we shut down some of the largest fake review brokers and sued more than 10,000 Facebook group administrators. In the last few weeks we also launched fresh legal actions against more than 20 websites, some of which targeted our UK store.”
Anoop Joshi, vice-president of legal and platform integrity at Trustpilot, said: “We closely monitor Facebook groups claiming to sell fake reviews on Trustpilot, and take strong and robust action to combat the practice.” He said Trustpilot had submitted 76 takedown requests to social media platforms last year, including Meta, asking for groups, pages and accounts to be removed over review selling and other attempts to abuse its platform.
Google said its policies “clearly state reviews must be based on real experiences, and when we find policy violations, we take swift action ranging from content removal to account suspension and even litigation. We catch the vast majority of policy-violating reviews before they’re ever seen.”
Fiverr said it had a zero-tolerance approach to fake reviews. “We do see some of these services make it through our toolset … but the team is proactively tracking and adapting to the techniques used in every possible way.”
