Don't Fall for Fake Online Reviews

Whether you're deciding what book to order from Amazon or where to stay on your next family vacation, you've probably skimmed online reviews to learn from other customers' experiences. Unfortunately, some of these reviews may be fake.

Tyler Cohen Wood, cyber branch chief for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and author of new book "Catching the Catfishers," says fake reviews are a growing issue. "The problem is that people rely on reviews and businesses, and people too really live and die by their reviews," she says. "It's not the biggest deal in the world if you read a review on a restaurant and the food is kind of gross, but it's a really big deal if you're relying on reviews for bus charter services or babysitting services, and your family's safety is at risk."

According to Wood, fake reviews happen in a few different ways. Sometimes, a company itself posts fake reviews or hires a marketing company to do it for them. Or a competitor may post overly negative fake reviews to try to gain market share. "If someone is personally angry with a person or a service, they'll write a fake negative review against that service," she adds.

When business school professors Yaniv Dover, Dina Mayzlin and Judith Chevalier studied thousands of hotels reviewed on TripAdvisor and Expedia, the trio found that fakery was more prevalent on the pages of smaller, independent hotels versus large, corporate hotel brands. "Smaller hotels have more of an incentive," says Dover, who teaches business administration at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. "There's seemingly more incentive for you to fake because the rewards are high, and implications are not so bad as if you were part of a corporation."

So, how can you tell if a review is the real deal?

Real customers might include specifics such as what they ordered, when they visited or why they chose that business ("I'd been dying to try the bourbon French toast after my roommate raved about it!" or "My husband and I booked this hotel for our anniversary"). As Wood points out, "it's impossible to write specific and personal details describing a service that you've never used."

[Read: 4 Outrageous Scams Consumers Fall For.]

Reviews that include vague puffery without any supporting details may also set off figurative alarm bells. "If you see a review that says this hotel is 'awesome, amazing,'" Dover says, "even if it's not fake, something's wrong with that review."

A peak at the reviewer's other content can help provide context. "Do they rate everything with five stars?" Wood asks. "Do they always review with very little detail? Chances are, that could be a paid service." Users who've only posted one or two reviews and don't post a photo of themselves (as many websites allow them to do) may also be less trustworthy.

The reviewer's location could be another tipoff that something is amiss. "If a reviewer is not actually located where the service is but they're writing about services in New York City, and the next day they're writing them for San Francisco," be wary, Wood says. A reviewer might post reviews on vacation, but they'll typically mention the vacation in the review.

Even so, Emanuel Rosen, co-author of "Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information," thinks most consumers can't identify fake reviews with a high degree of accuracy. "Somebody can run a study where they find the characteristics of fake reviews," he says, "and the moment this is published, the people who write fake reviews see that information and can adjust accordingly." Some companies filter reviews they believe may be fake, but, like a consumer's ability to detect fakery, they're not 100 percent accurate.

To counter this, Rosen suggests reading multiple reviews to look for themes instead of relying too heavily on a small number of user reviews. "If I pick a random review from TripAdvisor," he says, "I have no way of telling if this was written by a real customer. But if I read 20 reviews, it's much less likely that the overall impression is incorrect."

[See: 10 Surprising Facts About Modern Consumers.]

Also try to read across multiple platforms to get a larger sample of reviews from different places. TripAdvisor users may be prolific and detailed reviewers, for instance, but other sites like Expedia verify that the reviewer stayed at a given hotel. Yelp has thousands of user-generated restaurant and bar reviews, but you'll also find reviews of many of these establishments on other sites like Urbanspoon. Some review sites will highlight feedback posted by your Facebook friends, which could be helpful -- assuming you actually know and trust those reviewers.

Rosen recommends looking at both user-generated and expert reviews. "Rotten Tomatoes shows what film critics have said versus viewers," he says. "You get the overall picture by looking at these diverse sources of information."

[Read: How Short Attention Spans Are Changing Shoppers.]

While filtering out all fakery may not be a realistic goal, Dover says real hotel guests or restaurant-goers post their true opinions, and the "crowdsourcing effect" helps to counter and downplay the phony ones. "Even if consumers are inefficient in identifying fake reviews," he says, "the system is built in a way that is representative overall."