A report from global marketing research company Nielsen showed that online reviews were the second most trusted source of information about brands. So it is not surprising that counterfeiters post fake reviews and even pay third parties to publish bogus reviews of their products on e-commerce platforms.
Some fake reviews may even come from businesses that aren’t counterfeiters. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settled a lawsuit with Sunday Riley Modern Skincare in which the FTC claimed the company had posted fake positive reviews of its products.
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But whether they are from an otherwise-authentic business or a counterfeiter, fake reviews can increase the ability of an e-commerce seller to deceive consumers.
Lara Miller, counsel at the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition in Washington DC, says if a fake positive review of a counterfeit encourages a customer to buy an unsatisfactory product, that customer may then post a negative review which further damages the brand’s reputation.
But brand monitoring services and lawyers say that although these reviews might make a consumer more likely to purchase a fake, they often contain characteristics that can alert professionals that a product is suspicious.
Daniel Bennett, president of brand protection at Corsearch in London, says a seller that has a lot of reviews with consistently incorrect grammar and the same writing style may be posting fraudulent reviews or soliciting third parties to post fakes.
Some reviews may be too positive, very vague or give no insight on why a product is “unbelievable,” he adds. Still, he notes that it’s difficult to prove that reviews are fake.
Tip off or not
Patchen Haggerty, partner at Perkins Coie in Seattle, says a new listing with immediate positive reviews can also be a red flag.
Rachel Jones, founder at SnapDragon Monitoring in Edinburgh, Scotland, says brands can also compare positive reviews with any negative reviews a product has. “If you get a lot of very positive reviews and there might be one that just says, ‘this is just so dodgy’, it makes you think all the really positive reviews might be fake.”
She notes that some fraudsters use groups on social media to offer free products for five-star reviews.
Sometimes authorised distributors can alert companies to a counterfeit with fake positive reviews. Brett Heavner, partner at Finnegan in Washington DC, says distributors will sometimes approach a company and question who another distributor is and why they are getting positive reviews.
Heavner adds that companies sometimes get complaints from consumers who will mention that the item had great reviews but that it was a terrible product.
He says that Amazon and a lot of retail platforms take the fake review problem seriously. Amazon invites people to submit complaints or suspicions about fake reviews so that it can examine them and try to weed them out, he explains.
Work cut out
But it’s not always easy for brands to spot fake reviews.
For one thing, not all good reviews of inauthentic products are necessarily fake. Nancy Merritt, senior manager of global relationships at brand protection company OpSec Security, points out that people typically post reviews not too long after they get a product and it’s possible that the counterfeit item works just fine then.
“If it looks the same, works the same and acts the same, consumers have no reason to believe otherwise and it’s going to get a good review,” she says.
But Heavner says he is not that familiar with situations where consumers genuinely like counterfeits. “Usually counterfeits are not that great and virtually all reviews are fake. They’re sent out to content farms and generated automatically,” he says.
Even when brand owners are able to identify suspicious reviews, consumers usually can’t. Kelly McCarthy, partner at Sideman & Bancroft in San Francisco, says a user might need to read 100 different reviews of a seller to spot similarities or suspicious reviews. Most customers won’t spend the time to do this, she says.
She adds that brand owners may also find it too monumental of a task to evaluate which of these sellers’ reviews may be fake because companies would have to sort through the reviews of thousands of sellers.
Tricks of the trade
Lawyers and brand protection services have other ways to identify counterfeiters even when fake reviews don’t tip them off.
Bennett at Corsearch says his company looks at the titles of product listings, price points and volume of stock, which can help determine whether items are fake or real.
He adds that Corsearch collects data to build profiles of infringers and their activity across the internet and offline. These profiles help Corsearch validate that the targets it pursues are suspicious.
Jones at SnapDragon says her company also looks at where a product is being sourced from.
According to Haggerty, Perkins Coie typically looks at spelling errors in the listings and differences in descriptions of the materials that the product is made from.
She adds that brands can make sample purchases of suspected counterfeits to compare markings and packaging. Peeling labels, low-quality ink, printing errors and loose products are all signs that an item might be fake, she says.
Haggerty says companies should take advantage of programmes on e-commerce sites that allow brand owners to use automated protections that scan the platforms to remove counterfeits. She says the programmes require a trademark, so brands should register their marks for products they want to protect.
Fake reviews of counterfeits are bad for brands because they can deceive consumers and hurt companies’ reputations. But if brand monitoring services look for tell-tale signs of fake reviews and keep up with best practices, they may be able to stay ahead of the fraudsters.
