Fake reviews and Amazon.com

I used to be an active reviewer in TripAdvisor, until one day. That day, as usual, I was going through TripAdvisor, reviewing places I have been before. I found a large segment of fake reviews. I reported them to TripAdvisor with proof. They did nothing. In fact, an average Indian restaurant had become the #1 in Lisboa, thanks to fake reviews! TripAdvisor failed to take action even though I proved it with substantial evidence. Of course, eventually more people visited, and real reviews started coming in more than the fake ones in number. TripAdvisor re-adjusted the rating to #1,532 of 4,361 Restaurants in Lisbon, from its previous spot, when I checked now (2 years later). [Read the full story]

Rating, once fake reviews are removed

This time I fell for fake reviews on Amazon. A product that does not even work properly got all 5* reviews, thanks to fakes. As of now, with 27 reviews, it is 4.5*, including my 1*. When I bought it, it was all 5* reviews! Then, today I found an excellent website named fakespot.com that identifies fake reviews. It recognizes and eleminates the fake reviews and gives you the correct review back. So according to that site, this product deserves just 1.5*. Indeed, an accurate rating! There is also another website called reviewmeta.com which does not seem to work as good as fakespot.com.

My review of the same product

WSJ has made an excellent video on these fake reviews. You should watch it.

Another site I like to use often is camelcamelcamel.com, which identifies whether a discount is really a discount by tracing the pricing variations for the products sold on Amazon.

Make sure to check the reviews of the other products from the same vendor when purchasing something. Currently, the product in question has already been sold out, and I am not even sure whether the seller will sell it again. Probably they bought some of these in Chinese street market and sold them all successfully soon after. Therefore, blacklisting or making aware of the buyers of a single product is not going to work. This has to happen at making aware of shady vendors, not just their dubious products. Next time, need to be a bit more vigilant when shopping in Amazon. The fakes are improving their game.


Update (Jan 19th):
Now with my 1-* review together with someone else's 1-* review (which I think the only honest reviews) in consideration, Fakespot has updated its rating to the product as 0-*. Indeed the ideal rating for this product. I wish Amazon lets me give 0-* ratings. :) 

Analysis overview

• How are reviewers describing this item?
  good, easy, nice, little and better.
• Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is high deception involved.
• Our engine has analyzed and discovered that 16.1% of the reviews are reliable.
• This product had a total of 31 reviews on Jan 19 2019.

Update (March 17th):
The seller contacted me over the phone (from China!) and email and tried to negotiate me to delete the review by offering me increasing offers of 10$, 30$, and 50$ with a full refund with the product as free. I already returned the product and got the full refund during the refund window. I sent their email communications with all the proofs to Amazon and asked them to take action. Amazon failed to take action and the seller managed to delete some (at least one 1-star review, I noticed) negative reviews with similar bribes.



Their email goes like this:

***************************************************

Regarding your Amazon Product Review

Dear Customer,
Thank you for purchasing our Active Stylus Pen
Thank you for your purchase and taking the time to write a product review. We are terribly sorry to hear the product you received is defective and would like to know if we can send you a free replacement or assist you with a refund.

Customer reviews is important to us and we value your response. All responses will be used to further improve the quality of our service and products.

We saw the 1 star review you wrote down on January 16. This has a great impact on us. We are just a small seller. This will cause great harm to us. I want to ask you to help me delete this 1 star review. Can you help me?

We can provide you with a full refund and the product will be given as a gift, and we will pay you an additional $50 as compensation.

Can you accept it?

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for giving us the opportunity to rectify the matter.

Looking forward to your reply

Sincerly yours
Milletech Customer Service Team




***************************************************

Of course, my review will remain there. I truly wish Amazon was more proactive in removing or restricting these fake sellers. The product is thriving with more and more fake reviews. Amazon took 0 action to protect the customers from this shady seller. On the other hand, this is just a sample. I am sure that this is not the first or the last product to use fake reviews to boost the sales. Amazon agreed that the seller got my phone number and email address from their system. It is really bad that Amazon discloses this information to the seller without a valid reason. This information enables the sellers to bribe or threaten the customers to leave positive reviews.

Finally, I ask everyone to do additional research rather than blindly trusting the reviews they find online. Remember that a review you read online may have been incentivized even if they do not explicitly say so.

TripAdvisor: How fake reviews can ruin your travel diaries..

There are many fake reviews in TripAdvisor. It is easy to spot one that harvests fake reviews. They are usually reviewers just have reviewed only the current one with a 5*. This is not to say that all the once-only reviewers are fake. But if a place is reviewed all 5* by these newbies, that should ring a bell. Moreover, I have seen in freelancing sites "employers" asking for 100s of reviews in sites such as TripAdvisor for a hundred dollars! It can also be friends filling TripAdvisor reviews for a restaurant owner, or even the restaurant employees creating multiple fake accounts to accumulate 5* ratings. 

It can also be social engineering. When I stayed in New Delhi in 2012, the hotel owner asked me to rate them 5* in TripAdvisor. That was my first review! I guess a normal person would have given 5*. Does not hurt. right? But I gave 4*, the rating I thought the hotel deserves (than what the owner hinted)! Would be easier to manipulate one's rating with some benefit (like a discounted rate) though. I am not going to give fake 5* ratings for free stuff though. :) I hope.

Always check the 1* ratings. They may show how the place mistreats the visitors. Also 4* ratings. They tend to be the genuine happy customers. Fake reviewers always give 5*. Not 4*. No one pays to give 4* ratings! Similarly, 2* ratings tend to be more rational than 1* too, unless the restaurant is really fishy and unpleasant.

I sent a detailed report to TripAdvisor content-integrity sometime back on a sample situation. Their response was along the lines of "At the same time, we have privacy policies in place which prevent us from being able to divulge to anyone external to TripAdvisor the results of any investigations."

Apart from being Nepal restaurants in Europe, what is the other similarity shared by "Sushi King, Wijnegem", "Sushi King, Malle", "Leo, Lisbon, Portugal", and "Fishtail, Lisbon, Portugal"? They all have been reviewed by the same set of early reviewers who gave 5* reviews with extra-ordinary positive reviews. These reviewers also created their accounts just to review these restaurants!

The first 2 restaurants are in Belgium and as their name suggests, are owned by a same chain. The last 2 are in Portugal, and owned by an individual (see the attachment for proof, taken from TripAdvisor). There are many accounts that were created to review 2 or 3 among these or just 1 of these restaurants! Some of these reviewers have reviewed 1 or 2 of these restaurants more than once! (5-star each time).

I have attached two reviewers with this association for these 4 restaurants. There are many. Just go through each of these restaurants and click the 5-* ratings. You can see reviewers created solely to review one or a few of these 4 restaurants. All these reviewers are Nepalese or Indian.
 

One can do an association rule mining across all these profiles and get more associations to show how these reviewers are having a strong correlation with each of these. These 4 may be more than 4. I mean, if you find a 5th association, try to build a cluster to see whether they share the same pattern. I am just a volunteer TripAdvisor member. I gave up after finding 4.

1. It is highly unlikely that a large share of reviewers visited all 4 of these restaurants in 2 different countries, and created their accounts to review only these 4!
2. I suspect they have some incentives.
2.1. I have previously seen random employers in freelancer websites seeking freelancers to bulk review their pages in Facebook, TripAdvisor, etc..
2.2. They are probably friends of the owner. In case of Leo, it is currently #1 in Lisboa with just 136 reviews. These reviews can be from bots. Even if they are from real humans, it is not hard to find 136 "friends" for an Indian/Nepalese restaurant owner in Portugal.
3. Given that Leo is the #1 in Lisboa now, unsuspecting tourists visit there since it is a "must" now, as listed #1 by TripAdvisor. Some of them are satisfied naturally. The food is not bad - and deserve 3* - 4* anyway. So they leave a positive review. Some were a bit disappointed learning this is just yet another Indian restaurant. However, the initial bootstrap from the fake reviewers were strong enough for Leo.

As a continuous volunteer reviewer in TripAdvisor, I am disappointed to learn that TripAdvisor's approval workflow is not smart yet.

1) The ranking algorithm should be changed to
1.1) ensure a meritocracy than a democracy. In the Internet, each account is not necessarily a human. So democracy in such systems is flawed. Currently, there is no difference getting 100 5* reviews from fake accounts or bots and 100, real reviewers with proven track record.
1.2) give more importance to the number of reviews. 1000 4* reviews are probably better than 4.5* rating with 137 reviews. This should of course not harm the new businesses. So needs a smart approach. Requires further research. Currently this is the loophole how Leo managed to become the first in Lisboa!
2) The approval workflow should consist of a data mining approach to ensure reviews are not creating a pattern. As of now, I was able to find a pattern very easily among these companies. With a large set of engineers and the management interface/API, this should be simple for TripAdvisor team.
3) Fix the reporting system. Currently it is a bot. First, I report, and a canned response asked me to send an email to this address. I am not even sure whether this will be considered properly.

Leo coming to the top spot reminds me the story - http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/tripadvisor-denies-rating-system-is-flawed-after-fake-restaurant-tops-rankings-in-italy-10354818.html

The difference is Leo actually exists as a normal Indian/Nepalese restaurant. But there are much better Nepal or Indian restaurants around, and this surely is not the #1 of Lisboa.

These first 100 reviews were given by fake reviewers to give an initial bootstrap to secure the first place, and following were social engineering. The tourists who blindly follow TripAdvisor and pay a visit here assuming this to be the best of Lisboa. Following this huge popularity, this small canteen restaurant is even unable to cope with the number of customers, making the waiting time grow large. Unsuspecting customers take all these positively. Some even fell for the mediocre Indian food, which can also be found in any other Indian/Nepal/Bengal restaurant around.