[jlavine]

I find that it's usually pretty clear from the bizarre language, excess enthusiasm, and lack of detail which reviews are fake or paid for, without need to refer to any 3rd-party websites. For many products with fewer than 100 ratings, it's clear that all or almost all of the ratings are fake. This often happens when there are several versions of essentially the same product, presumably all from the same factory in China. It's usually best to stick to the one or two variants with the most reviews.

[retsibsi]

Bear in mind that the existence of obviously fake reviews doesn't imply that all fake reviews are obvious. Maybe it would be prohibitively expensive to do a really good job of producing fake reviews at scale, I don't know -- but surely some companies manage to avoid the obvious tells.