department of education who now runs a YouTube channel called Fake Review Watch.

'It's just not believable,' said Kay Dean, a former fraud investigator with the U.S. But a closer look reveals that the faces in the photos are often poached from other parts of the internet, and the content they post follows a suspiciously set pattern.įor instance, two apparently unrelated Google reviewers patronized the same pizza restaurant in Toronto, tutoring club in Delaware, counselling centre in Michigan, as well as outlets of the same national lawn care and home security firms in far flung parts of the United States.Īnd while it's possible that two people could have coincidentally left five-star reviews for the same businesses scattered around North America, it's implausible that of 71 reviewers for a downtown Toronto pizzeria, 50 would also have used that same lawn care company and 20 bought a wig from a single store in Vaughan, Ont. The profiles have pictures and often have 15 or more reviews. To the average consumer scrolling through Google reviews for a local business, those accounts and postings would appear normal. One fake review account found by CBC News uses the name Nelly Walker, but has a photo of Dorothy Height, a civil rights activist and contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr., who died in 2010. Using data gathering and analysis techniques, a CBC News investigation has catalogued just a portion of one fake review network: 1,279 businesses across North America connected by 208 fake accounts that posted 3,574 fake reviews. The incident is just one example of a widespread problem that's plaguing Google's popular star-rating system - a growing black market in which some companies pay for fake positive reviews, while others are seemingly being extorted by web firms who post negative comments then propose their 'review-fixing' services to get them taken down. The review was fake and fit a pattern that Pereira, the company's vice-president of sales, had been observing for months - a slew of made-up complaints targeting the company's online reputation. The oligarch had never been a customer at Riverbend Moving and Storage, a small business that offers residential and commercial moving services in Winnipeg. When Roman Abramovich, a Russian billionaire and owner of the English Premier League's Chelsea Football Club, appeared to have posted a Google review complaining that a Manitoba moving company lost three of his watches, Chris Pereira knew something was wrong.

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