Sitting on a pile of junk that you can’t move on e-Bay or Amazon? “Which?” magazine recommends that you go out and buy some fake reviews.
This isn’t quite and exactly how they phrase their advice but it is the nub of the point being made:
Fake reviews make people twice as likely to buy poor-quality products – even when reviewers admit they were incentivised to boost ratings, a study by Which? has found.
The consumer watchdog said that products it had given its lowest ‘Don’t Buy’ recommendation were bought more often when given inflated ratings on online marketplaces.
The findings come as the Competition and Markets Authority announced last week that it is launching an investigation into misleading reviews on online shopping sites.
That is, fake reviews actually work. Therefore you should go and buy some for why wouldn’t you do more of what works?
As to the Competition and Markets Authority review we already know what that will say now, don’t we? Te providers of the reviews are, for that modest price they charge, delivering value. Therefore no fraud is taking place and it’s just fine for the business to continue.
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I believe that the way it works in the UK is that you don't have to be caught using the burglary tools. You just have to be caught carrying them.
The writer of the fake review is not defrauding the merchant who paid to get a fake review written. But the merchant is (thereby) defrauding the purchaser. To discover that a scam is effective is not to advocate for scamming.
However, most of the evidence I see that the reviews were "fake" is that they regarded a product as high-quality when "Which?" declared it low-quality. Makes me think of Twitter slapping a "Deceptive!" label on tweets from Trump.
Were the consumers buying a product, or just saying which one they would buy? The incentive when doing a survey is answering as quickly as possible to get to get to the prize drawer entry. Even if you're taking it seriously, you aren't taking it as seriously as when you've got skin in the game. If people have to vacuum the carpet for a few years with their selection, they're going to be more careful, aren't they?
I'm not saying that fake reviews don't have an effect (or people wouldn't do them) but it's not going to be that high, and particularly across all products people buy. If TripAdvisor was noticeably worse than The Good Food Guide, people would hand over the cash for The Good Food Guide. Do you hand over £120 to Which every year, or lose say, £10 of value for picking the wrong TV because a fake tipped you from best to 2nd best?
Which has been irrelevant and a zombie for years, why pay to buy 'Which?' reviews when the fakes are just as good.
The problem with most online reviews is that either the customer is motivated to give a review because they are not happy, thus' * whinge' or, the seller having solicited a review, the satisfied customer doesn't want to appear mean, thus '***** AWESOME'. It is very rare to find any reviews that just say '*** got wot I paid for'
You have left out the most amusing bit. The conclusion was based on an experiment in which 10,000 volunteers used a "simulated Amazon site". But that means that all the reviews were fake.