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Key Takeaways
- Fake reviews are often used to manipulate you into either mistakenly trusting a poorly-received product, or avoiding good products from a competitor.
- Look out for anything suspicious, like a cluster of overly-positive reviews from around the same time, vague wording, repetition of phrases, and accounts with strange review history.
- Tools like Fakespot can help identify fake reviews as well.
Black Friday can be a great time to nab a deal, and reading product reviews is one way to assess whether something is worth buying. However, not every review is genuine, so it’s important to know how to spot which are fake.
Why Do Fake Reviews Exist?
Some companies use fake positive reviews to manipulate you into buying the product. It could be a few individuals behind the fake reviews, or it could be an entire farm of bots. It’s gotten bad enough for the US Federal Trade Commission to start fining companies it catches using fake reviews.
Many of these phony reviews provide top marks in an effort to boost the average rating, to the point where any legitimate complaints get buried. Generally, lackluster products can be tougher to spot when they have an almost perfect aggregate review score.
On the other side of it are the fake negative reviews—usually the result of either a shady competitor or someone (or a group) with an ax to grind. A product with numerous bad reviews could cause you to mistakenly think a decent product is terrible. You then might be more inclined to unknowingly purchase a similar item with fake positive reviews instead.
How to Spot a Fake Review
It’s easy to get caught up in the Black Friday chaos and buy without consideration. However, always take a moment to pause and analyze the reviews. Once you know what to look for, fake reviews are relatively easy to spot.
The first thing to check is the date. There’s nothing particularly special about a given day or month, but a large number of positive (or negative) reviews clustered around the same timeframe could be a sign of automated reviews coming in all at once.
Pay attention to what some of these reviews actually say. If you notice repeated words or phrases, they’re likely all a batch of fake reviews—either from folks working off a script, automated bots, or people using generative AI to help with the scam.
If a particular review seems fishy, look into that account’s review history. Do they always rate everything very high or very low? Is there a lot of repetition in the kinds of things they write? Then it might be a fake account leaving fake reviews.
While you’re looking into a specific account, check for other notable details as well. An account made recently that’s left several reviews is suspicious—as is, to a lesser extent, a generic username and the use of a website’s default profile icon.
Does the site you’re browsing support some kind of verified purchase indicator? If so, it’s best to ignore (and filter out, if you can) all other reviews and only look at what verified purchasers have to say.
Online tools like Fakespot can help as well. Simply copy and paste the product URL into the text field and Fakespot will analyze the reviews and let you know the results. Just be aware that the service only supports a handful of websites (Amazon, Best Buy, Sephora, Steam, and Walmart) and false positives aren’t an impossibility.
Fakespot is also available as a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, or you can download the app from Google Play or the App Store.
All of this can be time-consuming, but it beats buying a dodgy product in the Black Friday hype. If your friends or family own the product you’re looking at, speak to them—then you’ll know you’re getting a review from a real person!