Writing fake reviews or paying for online reviews will only hurt your business

The social media has changed not just our personal lives, but also the way businesses function to a larger extent. A lot of us follow online reviews before taking the plunge, be it shopping, booking a hotel or using an app. From meals to movers and packers, maximum positive reviews and star ratings help us take a call. These days, even tech events rope in ‘influencers’ to talk about the product. And somewhere on the darker side, there seems to be a flourishing business of sort that helps put your products in a positive light by calling them the best or highly recommended.

The most recent Warner Bros. episode brings back into light this dark side as it is accused of paying YouTubers for positive reviews for its game.  PewDiePie needs no introduction, even someone remotely associated with gaming (like me), knows he is big star on YouTube. And, exchanging money for a good review, may have helped him make easy bucks, but also led to misleading his loyal followers. We aren’t really sure how much has it affected him or other gamers, buy we are sure it isn’t as much as the company. For Warner Bros. it will only tarnish the image of the company and its products. FTC complaint has pulled up Warner Bros. for cash payments as long as these ‘influencers’ met certain criteria that works in the game’s favor - no mention of bugs, content should be positive, no negative sentiments and atleast one Facebook/Twitter post.

These are new-age problems. A sort of fraud, wherein u are offering false information. There are no laws or rules out there to deal with such things on a broader scale. In this case, there has been an FTC settlement. According to Engadget , “Under the terms of the agreement, Warner Bros. is banned from failing to disclose similar deals in the future, and cannot pretend that sponsored videos and articles are actually the work of independent producers.”

But, there have been similar issues in the past.

In October 2015, Amazon had sued over 1000 people for writing fake reviews. The lawsuit emphasised on how the false reviews damaged brand reputation and were inauthentic. Amazon said there were 1,114 defendants, termed “John Does” offering false review service for as little as $5 (£3.24) on the website Fiverr.com, with most promising five-star reviews for a seller’s products. Ad you see, Amazon sued the people, and not Fiverr. In fact, Fiverr was working at cracking the case.  It should be noted that anyone can write a review for a product sold on Amazon’s online store, whether a customer or not, but paid or fictional reviews are illegal as per company’s rules.

In May 2014, Italy’s anti-trust board had fined TripAdvisor $600,000 over failure to stop fake reviews. TripAdvisor argued how it has process in place to detect fraudsters and also automated tools and algorithms that work against people trying to cheat the system.

Today, the extent of us relying on the Internet and online reviews and suggestions is so much that fraudulent reviews can only be categorised as scams to dupe people into believing they are paying for the best, while they may be not. Multiple good reviews and star ratings is something that becomes a core of our power to decide as we rely on Internet, and it is essential to have rules and regulations in place to nip such practices in the bud.