Ilia Zavialov reviews the language of fake reviews: a dictionary of the techniques behind the stars

Why a review page needs a dictionary

A page of reviews looks like the simplest thing on the internet. Stars, a few sentences, a date and a name. Most people read the average, skim the top three comments and decide in under a minute.

That minute is exactly what the review trade is built for. A page designed to be read quickly is also a page designed to be believed quickly, and every technique below works best on a reader who never scrolls past the first screen.

Behind that page sits a small industry with its own vocabulary. People who buy, sell, hide and move reviews have precise words for each technique, and each of those words describes a way the page can show something other than what customers actually experienced.

Knowing the words changes how a page reads. A burst of five star reviews in one week stops looking like popularity and starts looking like a campaign. A company with no complaints at all stops looking perfect and starts looking filtered.

This dictionary covers the terms that matter most for anyone checking a financial service, an online shop, an investment offer or a person before trusting them with money. Each entry says what the practice is, how it shows on the page and what to do about it.

Fake review, paid review, incentivised review

A fake review is written by someone who never used the product or service. It can be written by the business itself, by a hired writer or by software, and it describes an experience that did not happen.

A paid review is written in exchange for money. The writer may or may not have used the service, and the payment gives them a reason to be positive that readers cannot see.

An incentivised review is written in exchange for something other than cash: a discount, a free month, entry into a prize draw or a refund on the purchase. The reward is legal to offer in many places only when it is disclosed and when it does not depend on the review being positive.

On the page these look alike. The signs are clusters of reviews posted within days of each other, similar length and structure, the same unusual phrases repeated, and reviewer profiles that have written one review ever or dozens on unrelated businesses in different cities on the same day.

Generated text has made the first sign weaker and the last sign stronger. A writing tool can vary the wording of a hundred reviews, but it cannot give a hundred accounts a believable history, so the reviewer profile is now the more reliable place to look.

Review gating and review suppression

Review gating means asking customers whether they are happy first, and then sending only the happy ones to the public review page. Unhappy customers are routed to a private feedback form that nobody else will ever see.

The result is a page with honest reviews and a dishonest average. Each individual review is real, but the selection is curated, so the page shows the top of the distribution and presents it as the whole.

Review suppression is the same idea done after the fact. Negative reviews are reported as abusive, disputed until the platform removes them, or answered with legal threats that push the writer to delete them.

The sign of both is an average that is too clean. Real services have bad days, delays and misunderstandings, and a page with hundreds of reviews and almost nothing below four stars is more likely filtered than flawless.

Watch the business replies as well. A company that answers every complaint with the same pasted apology, or with an accusation that the reviewer is a competitor, is managing the page. A company that answers with details and a solution is dealing with customers.

Review hijacking and merged listings

Review hijacking means moving reviews from one product or business to another. A seller takes over an old listing with thousands of genuine reviews for a different product and swaps in a new item, so the reviews now appear to describe something they never described.

The same happens with businesses that change names. A company closes after complaints, reopens under a new name and asks the platform to merge the old listing, or buys an existing listing with a good history.

The sign is a mismatch between what reviews talk about and what the page sells. Reviews that mention a different product, a different service, a different city or a founding date that does not fit are worth reading closely.

Sort reviews by oldest first. The earliest reviews show what the listing was originally about, and a sudden change in subject at some point in its history marks the moment the listing changed hands.

Check the name history too. Search for the business address and phone number and see which other names appear with them, because a new brand at an old address often carries an old set of complaints under a different name.

What UK law bans since April 2025

In the United Kingdom, from 6 April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 made several review practices banned outright. That applies to businesses selling to consumers from London and Manchester to Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow.

The banned practices include writing or commissioning fake reviews, publishing incentivised reviews without making the incentive clear, hiding negative reviews and presenting star ratings that give a misleading picture. The CMA published guidance for businesses on fake reviews before the rules took effect.

The Competition and Markets Authority can now enforce consumer law directly and fine a business up to 10 percent of its global turnover for breaches.

For readers this matters in a simple way. Each technique in this dictionary now has a legal name in the UK, and a report that uses that name is easier to act on.

Sockpuppets, insiders and company controlled review sites

A sockpuppet is a fake identity run by someone who pretends to be an independent customer. One person may run dozens, each with its own name, photo and posting history, and use them to praise one business and attack its competitors.

Insider reviews are written by employees, owners, relatives or partners without saying so. They may describe real experiences, but the relationship is hidden, and that is what makes them misleading.

A company controlled review site looks like an independent comparison or rating service but is owned or paid by one of the businesses it rates. It ranks its owner first and presents the ranking as neutral research.

Financial fraud uses this last technique heavily. A fake investment platform often comes with a set of review sites that rate it highly, a set of articles calling it trusted, and a recovery service that also has glowing reviews and promises to get money back for a fee.

The check is ownership. Look at who runs the review site, when its address was registered, whether it rates anything other than the one business, and whether its contact page names a real organisation with an address you can verify.

Negative campaigns, review bombing and fake social proof

Review bombing is a sudden wave of negative reviews, usually from accounts that never dealt with the business. It is used against competitors, against people in a dispute, and against individuals whose name someone wants to damage in search results.

The signs mirror those of fake positive reviews: many reviews in a short period, similar wording, new accounts and the same accusation repeated without any specific detail such as a date, an amount or an order number.

Fake social proof covers bought followers, bought likes and bought views. A page with a large audience and almost no real conversation under its posts is showing numbers that were purchased to look popular.

Genuine criticism has texture. It names what happened, when and what the writer tried to do about it, and it often includes the business response. Criticism with none of that detail tells you about the campaign more than about the target.

A negative campaign also tends to travel. The same text appears on several complaint sites, forums and anonymous blogs within days, often with the same spelling mistakes, which is a sign of one source copied many times.

How to read a review page in five minutes

Start with the distribution. A normal page has a spread of ratings with some complaints. A page that is almost all five stars, or a sudden cluster of one star reviews, is worth a second look before anything else.

Sort by newest and by oldest, and read the three star reviews first. The middle of the distribution is where people describe specific problems and specific good points without the pressure to praise or punish.

Open three reviewer profiles at random. Real reviewers have histories that make sense: reviews of places near where they live, over years, with different ratings. Accounts created recently with one review or hundreds in a day are signals.

Look for specifics. Names of staff, amounts, dates, order numbers and the way a problem was solved are hard to fake in bulk and easy to check against what the business says.

Check the business outside the review page. A registered company, a regulator licence where one is required, a real address and a public history carry more weight than any number of stars, and a review page can never replace them.

When a person is being reviewed

Reviews of people work differently from reviews of shops. There is no order to confirm, and a page about a named person can collect praise or accusations from anyone who wants to write them.

The same vocabulary applies. Sockpuppets write both glowing and hostile posts about individuals, review bombing targets names in search results, and anonymous pages present one sided stories as settled fact.

The fair way to read such a page is to separate what is documented from what is asserted. A court record, a regulator decision or a published article with a named author is documentation. An anonymous post repeated on several sites is one assertion copied several times.

Before drawing a conclusion about anyone, compare the claim with primary sources: official registers, the person's own published statements and independent reporting that cites evidence.

Search results add one more layer. A name can collect pages that rank because they are new and heavily linked, and their position says nothing about whether their claims are true, so the order of results is never evidence by itself.

Where to report fake reviews in the UK

Report the review to the platform first using its own reporting tool, and keep a screenshot with the date and the reviewer profile, because reported reviews often disappear.

Report the business practice to Citizens Advice, which passes consumer complaints to Trading Standards, and to the CMA through its online reporting form. If fake reviews were used to sell an investment and money was lost, report it to Report Fraud at reportfraud.police.uk or on 0300 123 2040.

For financial services check the FCA register before trusting any review, and check the FCA warning list of firms that operate without authorisation.

Keep a record of what you found. Links, screenshots, reviewer names and dates make a complaint useful to whoever receives it and to anyone else checking the same business later.