A news station in Los Angeles just did a report about fake online reviews of businesses, and tracked down a whole market of people who sell their “special abilities” for money!
One guy in the story is from Bangladesh and uses fake names and pictures for people to choose what types of “packages” they want to purchase for the phony reviews. Specifically, he charges $4 per Google review and $5 for each one on Facebook and does them under fake identities or profiles.
The woman in this story, Patti Black, runs a stationery store in LA called Black Ink and is not happy people would even use these types of scamming sites after helping with this investigation.
“It’s not honest,” she said, “Who are these people? They don’t know my store,” Black added.
Now we’re not sure what kinds of reviews a stationery store would really have but we get the idea. So if you’re looking to not get “tricked” by reviews, the report suggests you take way more time than is really necessary. It says you should take the time to check the reviewer’s other reviews, watch out for generic language, look at the dates of the reviews, and lastly research the account’s profile.
If you don’t have a million years to check a business’ total review profile, well then we guess that’s too bad and you’ll be scammed.
