(This is Part 1 of a [tbd] Part series…)
Have you noticed the dramatic decline in the quality and trustworthiness of online reviews? Or are you someone who trusts Amazon and Google ratings, and believes that these “verified” reviewers are telling the truth?
Fake reviews have become so pervasive that it can be categorized as it’s own industry: FaaS. Fraud as a service.
Here are some off-the-top of my head examples:
- Buying Twitter and Insta followers.
- Writers I’ve met who used to get paid to write fake reviews.
- The card my friend got in his Amazon package from the seller: offering to pay (I forget how much via PayPal) for a positive review.
It’s so bad that anti-fraud as a service has emerged to combat the shill at this point. I installed something called FakeSpot in Chrome so that I could see trustworthiness scores when I’m about to make a purchase on Amazon.
According to MarketWatch, 84% of consumers say they can’t always spot a fake review. Which doesn’t surprise me. A lot of the time, people don’t even read many reviews – they make a decision solely on the star rating on a product or business.