Fake Reviews and Testimonials
Red Flag Rants: Fake Reviews and Testimonials report #1
This report is in our editorial queue. Visit Red Flag Rants for everything published so far.
Read the report →A five-star rating is only useful if it's honest. This section covers the tactics companies use to inflate their star ratings: paying for reviews, filtering out unhappy customers before they can post, quietly editing a testimonial to remove a complaint, or generating reviews wholesale. We also cover what a legitimate incentivized review program looks like, because asking for feedback isn't the problem. Hiding the fact that feedback was paid for, or engineered to exclude criticism, is.
See also: Deceptive Advertising and Marketing Experts and Agency Red Flags, or browse everything in Red Flag Rants.
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Fake Reviews and Testimonials
Red Flag Rants: Fake Reviews and Testimonials report #2
This report is in our editorial queue. Visit Red Flag Rants for everything published so far.
Read the report →
Fake Reviews and Testimonials
Red Flag Rants: Fake Reviews and Testimonials report #3
This report is in our editorial queue. Visit Red Flag Rants for everything published so far.
Read the report →
Fake Reviews and Testimonials
Red Flag Rants: Fake Reviews and Testimonials report #4
This report is in our editorial queue. Visit Red Flag Rants for everything published so far.
Read the report →Verified outside sources
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FTC Consumer Alerts
Official consumer alerts and scam warnings from the Federal Trade Commission.
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Verified Source
Fraud.com
Industry reporting on fraud trends, tactics, and detection across digital marketing and commerce.
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Verified Source
About-Fraud
A community and knowledge base covering fraud patterns, case discussion, and prevention.
Visit About-Fraud →Common questions
Is it illegal for a company to ask customers to leave a review?
No. Asking is normal and legal. It becomes a problem when the company pays for positive reviews without disclosure, discourages negative ones selectively, or writes reviews itself and attributes them to real or invented customers.
How can I spot a fake review pattern on a product page?
Look for a burst of five-star reviews posted in a short window, reviewers with no other review history, near-identical phrasing across multiple reviews, and an absence of any review between two and four stars, which is statistically unusual for most products.