As wonderful as the internet can be, I feel like it lies to us every day. Fake reviews—seemingly legitimate assessments created by a seller or someone paid by them—are becoming harder to spot. The online shopping boom has made them a big business, but they can end up costing you serious money. Is there anything any of us can do about it anymore?

In 2021, it was discovered that over 200,000 people were involved in a fake reviews scheme with third-party Amazon vendors. Worse yet, AI has made it more difficult to tell real people from robots. Amazon now has tools that allow sellers to generate product descriptions and create listings, and users to ask questions or compare products. And now Mozilla is shutting down Fakespot, maybe the best tool out there for spotting fake reviews.

Last year, the FTC finalized rules that ban companies from buying or selling reviews or having employees write fake reviews, among other things. Here’s how to report it. Still, that won’t necessarily prevent you from being duped. If you can’t tell a genuine review from a fraud, I recommend consulting our comprehensive reviews across multiple categories before making a tech purchase; our experts know their markets inside and out. However, if you’re browsing Amazon, I’ve noticed a few telltale signs a review may not be genuine.

What to Look Out For

After years of reading reviews and shopping online, I’ve noticed a few patterns among fake reviews. While you’re perusing Amazon, look out for any of the following:

• Very brief five-star and one-star reviews that lack proper context.

• Reviews that don’t use proper grammar or lack natural-sounding language. Some vendors farm out fake reviews to writers who are not native English speakers.

• Reviews that happen to plug a competing product should be ignored, since it could be another vendor hoping to lead you to their own product under false pretexts.

• If you find a listing that has several similar reviews posted on the same day, something fishy is going on.

• Overly staged photos, overproduced video, or stock photography in a review could be a sign someone paid money for it to be uploaded.

• If a listing has very few reviews, compared to a similar product, there’s a chance the whole thing is a scam.

• Take note of the reviewer’s name. If it’s too generic or just a random series of numbers and letters, that could be a sign the review is fake.

• Reviews that lack a Verified Purchase label should be disregarded immediately. However, this doesn’t take into account schemes where reviewers are compensated for legitimate purchases, so be wary here.

Is it AI Generated?

(Credit: PCMag / ZeroGPT)

It’s possible that AI tools are being used to mass-produce reviews on e-commerce sites like Amazon. They generate text by trying to emulate how humans write, which can lead to some wonky sentence structure and nonsensical ramblings. But how do you tell the difference between AI and a human with terrible writing skills? If a review looks suspicious, I say run it through one of the many systems that promise to identify AI-generated text.

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In my testing, I took a human-written story and an AI-generated equivalent, then ran it through GPTZero, Writer AI content detector, and ZeroGPT. These websites let you paste a selection of text, upload a document, or insert a URL. The text is then analyzed, and a score is given based on whether it was written by a human or AI. These tools proved to be accurate, though it’s worth noting that results can be less reliable with shorter submissions, such as online reviews.

Review checkers are tools that can be used to filter out questionable reviews on sites like Amazon and Best Buy to provide you with a more reliable scoring on a given listing. But Fakespot is shutting down on July 1, and I noticed that ReviewMeta no longer seems to load. It would seem that our list of allies in the fight against spam is growing thin.

Of the tools I’ve used previously, only TheReviewIndex seems to be online. It’s a simple search tool focused on aggregating tech product ratings on Amazon, but it can still determine if a product’s score has been boosted by fake reviews. Paste the URL into the site and it breaks the product out into different categories based on the words it parsed from reviews. At the same time, TheReviewIndex runs a spam test to ensure the reviews are authentic, providing a Pass/Fail grade at the end.

For this story, I used the listing for the Amazon Echo (4th Gen). Looking at our test product, TheReviewIndex gave it an 8.6 score and a passing spam grade, but only analyzed the most recent 848 reviews. You can then read through pulled clips—both positive and negative—that fit under the different product categories, and view the factors that go into spam testing.

(Credit: PCMag / TheReviewIndex)

How to Report a Fake Review

If you happen across a review you believe is fake, you can report it to Amazon, which will mark it for investigation and possible removal. Click the Report button under the review, choose Fake to mark it as “paid for, inauthentic” and click Submit. You can also go a step further by reporting a fake review directly to the FTC.

(Credit: PCMag / Amazon)

About Jason Cohen

Senior Editor, Help & How To

As PCMag’s editor of how to content, I have to cover a wide variety of topics and also make our stories accessible to everyday users. Considering my history as a technical writer, copywriter, and all-around freelancer covering baseball, comics, and more at various outlets, I am used to making myself into an expert.

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