Recently, while I was in the middle of creating a list of cool products for Cyber Monday, at Amazon, something weird came up. I noticed that some of the product reviews, concerning certain sloppy items, were really creepy. Now, how should I put this? Well, they were fake reviews.

A lot of people, when they are shopping online, fall victim to false product promotion. These so-called fake reviews play their role into convincing impulsive buyers to buy things that they shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

Now I don’t mean to say that Amazon itself is a bad place for shopping – in fact, it is a great website. It’s just that some people have been promoting those products that are either crappy, or maybe they were not supposed to be sold.

How to Spot Fake Product Reviews at Amazon?

Real users like yourself don’t write fake reviews. No sir, no ma’am. And we certainly don’t like to write one. Well, it’s totally another thing if one of us is having a hard time making ends meet, and gets a job to write fake reviews for a few pennies. But let’s just hope that those days don’t come in our lives. Until then, here’s a nice strategy for you to spot down those fake reviews.

• Take a good look at the “Drobo Mini Product Review” at Amazon. What do you see there, huh?

The guys, who actually bought this product, regret doing so because they fell victim to false advertisement and fake reviews. It is easy to spot these reviews as most of them seem way too much positive. They are too good to be true and promote a sense of hype, which, in my opinion, is obviously not gonna happen anytime soon with the product.

• Secondly, there is this “Cushy Lips – Lips Plumper and Gloss” product at Amazon. Oh boy, this one’s a real floozy.

4 Reviews and there’s “Antonia” who says that Cushy Lips does what it was made for. Of course her boyfriend won’t kiss her because her lips are too warm for his 

• Beware of the Fanboys: These guys advocate other products’ benefits by promoting hate comments about certain brands. What happens is that when a Fanboy sees something that he doesn’t like, he will start saying that the so-and-so product sucked and you should never buy it because XYZ product is so much better than this one!

Fanboys try to promote brands and certain items that they love, or are hired to promote.

• The name of the reviewer says a lot about his or her recent history. Fake reviewers don’t spend a lot of time with names. They just write down “SweetSally1234”, “Pfb6726” or something similar to start off with writing their reviews.

Likewise, if they have written only one review for one product only, it is a sham. In some cases, fake product reviewers at Amazon also appear to promote one brand only. They may have written several product reviews but they are all about one company’s items. Do keep an eye out for such behavior.

That being said, what do you have in mind when it comes to spotting down such reviews? Let us know through the comments below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 at 12:12 PM and is filed under Computers, How To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.