Seeing stars: Charles Assisi on the murky world of fake reviews

When an old acquaintance told me that he could massage the ratings of a book I wrote in 2018 and have it listed as a best-seller for as little as ₹5,000, he got my attention. Just how did he plan to do that? He told me, rather casually, that he would use what is called the “fake reviews economy”.

This is a sector that’s been around since the internet first went mainstream in the late 1990s, but it’s a sector that is now far more layered, and booming. Initially, it was vendors who posted fraudulent, glowing reviews of the wares they sold online; and / or negative ones about their competitors’ products. But it didn’t take an experienced eye long to see through these. For one thing, they were often at variance with the majority of opinions about the same product or vendor.

My acquaintance used to sell small electronics across various e-platforms. He has since repositioned himself as a food entrepreneur, “because competition in e-tail got too tough,” he says.

In his electronics re-seller avatar, he purchased cheap, imported products of all kinds from wholesale markets in Mumbai, and sold them through various virtual storefronts online at inflated prices. His business depended heavily on touched-up images, effusive reviews that he wrote himself, and the fact that he was shipping across India small, inexpensive electronics that many people would otherwise have no access to. Life was good, he says.

Then, in the pandemic, thousands of people desperate to augment their income or find new work got into the game as well. Some of these included the wholesalers he bought his products from.

He shifted his focus to food, he says, because he knew that, with just a handful of low-paid workers, he could rustle up all kinds of dishes. He rented a space to use as his “cloud kitchen”. A random name and dolled-up images made his multi-cuisine menu look entirely credible on the food aggregator apps. The calls began coming in, but this time with a twist.

“Writer”, “reviewers” and “bloggers” with numerous reviews and star ratings against their names on food aggregator apps began to call with offers to rate and review his outfit, for as little as ₹500. The more reviews he wanted, the higher the price would go, they said. The cheapest reviews would be generated by bots; they cost much less partly because they are often spotted as bot-generated and taken down by reviews platform.

Some of these reviews providers also offered to put my acquaintance in touch with an influencer or celebrity, who would post about his outfit for a few lakhs.

Was it really this easy, I asked. To prove his point, he suggested we drive around my neighbourhood. The fancy pictures from joints with four- and five-star reviews on food aggregator apps were a study in dichotomy. In real life, they were shoddy shops I would never step into.

The food business, he said, is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the same with aggregators for everything from grocery delivery to doorstep car servicing.

So, what is a customer to do? It was time to speak with a few insiders. While no one would comment on the record, they all agreed on a few parameters. If a reviewer has done largely 4- and 5-star reviews, that’s a red flag. If an outfit has largely 4- and 5-star reviews, that should be treated as a red flag too, unless one has seen the place and verified that it is top-notch. If a new place has scores of reviews, that’s a definite red flag; few services are flooded with customers as soon as they open.

To help analyse reviews on a platform, there are engines such as ReviewMeta and Fakespot that sift through products sold on e-commerce sites and filters reviews by estimated legitimacy. They also offer summary reviews based on what they believe to be genuine opinions.

But I had another question: What if one is a genuine vendor in this environment, and doesn’t want to deploy fake reviews? “I’ve accepted that my ratings will never go above 3.5 or 3.9,” says a friend in the restaurant business who has been around a long time.