I Was Offered Fake 5-Star Reviews in Quantity of 10s on Google, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Yelp: Turns Out, They re Amazingly Cheap | Wolf Street

The pile of apparently fake 5-star reviews has led me years ago to be leery of them. I just never knew how cheap they were.

I was approached via email by an outfit in India whose name I won t disclose because I don t want to give them a free promo. They offered to sell me 5-star reviews of some service they thought Wolf Street might be selling. So I followed up.

I mean, I might want to buy some 5-star reviews for my WOLF STREET beer mugs that aren t even for sale; I send them out as thank-you gifts for donations of $100 or more.  But hit hard by the beer mug shortage, I ve been out of mugs since November 2021. So I had a reason to inquire about their 5-star reviews.

And fake reviews from India face the problem of their IP address being from India reviews from India of the Wolf Street beer mugs that I don t even ship to India? I was hooked: How would they get around that?

via wolfstreet.com

I usually only buy products (including books) that have 4 1/2 stars or 5. But I’ve noticed, as I’m sure you have, that sometimes the reviews look pretty sketchy. They seem to come from the same voice, and often that voice isn’t idiomatic English. That’s ok if it’s a blender or something. For a book, not so much. How are we supposed to know what to buy? And don’t tell me “just buy the Amazon’s Choice!” That’s just the product made by the company willing to pay the biggest kickback to Jeff.