[plusmax1]

Proving reviews are fake is hard indeed. A few years back I fell for fake reviews. I was booking a trip and saw a fairly new "boutique hotel" with good reviews (on booking.com). Once we arrived, it was nothing of the sort. The hotel was grimy, the room was small, things were broken etc etc.

Once home I looked at the reviews again and I noticed a pattern: each review had only a few sentences and, in hindsight, odd language. For example, it was praising the management in quite a few of them. I don't know about you, but I've never considered the quality of "the management" of a hotel, let alone that I would be inclined to write about it in a review.

I'm sure they paid a shady company to post those reviews in order to boost their rating. I complained to booking.com, but of course they never did anything with it. I imagine it is hard for a platform to do, but I'm also sure they can do more than they do now.

[entuno]

It's never going to be perfect, because then you get into the arguments about exactly what a "fake" review is. But it could be better.

Because as you say, it's pretty common for companies to just go out and buy reviews. You see it all the time on places like Amazon - where a new product suddenly has hundreds of 5* reviews, all saying similar things, from accounts that just go round giving 5* reviews to all kinds of products. It's blatantly obvious to anyone who ever takes a cursory look at the reviews, let along to the company who has all the backend and analytical data about them.

Hopefully this means that companies are required to start doing something about that, or at the very least to respond to complaints like yours rather than just ignoring them.