Part I
Online company reviews are high stakes.
Top reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Google can get thousands of impressions each month and are major drivers of brand perception.
Employers know this. And when I come across multiple 5 star reviews left with no cons, or a Pulitzer worthy essay from a former intern, I become suspicious.
These reviews start to resemble 30 under 30 lists: so artificially constructed that you begin to question their credibility in the first place.
The scrutiny around company reviews is well documented; some companies file lawsuits worth over a million dollars to reveal anonymous reviewers that complain about their jobs.
Whilst it’s the flashy lawsuits that make the headlines, there also exists an underground economy of company reviews operating quietly every single day.
In this underground economy, some companies pay over $150 to freelancers to try and get a negative review removed. If they want “better” results, they go to the plethora of Online Reputation Management services (ORMs) in the United States that can charge retainers worth thousands of dollars.
The supply of positive reviews exists too. My research led me to find companies, including a prominent Y-Combinator backed startup, that solicit fake positive reviews from online freelancers to improve their rating.
Many of these mercenary fake reviewers, often based in South East Asia, make a full time living doing this, netting over $2,000 per month.
Some of these run such sophisticated operations that they’ve even created their own pricing tiers (e.g $35 per original review, $20 to post an already created review from an email address), a la SaaS offering.
Others operate on a contingency fee agreement model, where they only get paid if they’re able to take a negative review down.
The underground economy of company reviews is well and truly alive. And today we’re going to find out how it operates.
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Part II
Adding reviews
The barriers to entry for adding fake reviews are much lower than for getting reviews removed, so that’s where we’ll start.
To write an employer review, all you really need is the ability to create an email address. For most sites, you don’t need any proof of employment (say like a company specific email address).
I went on a gig marketplace site and posted a pretty vague post related to wanting to find out more on how to improve a company’s online presence.
Within minutes of posting a gig, my inbox was flooded with proposals:
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After a bit of chatting, I narrowed the scope of their services and summarized their rates into the table below:
Channel | Cost | Timeline | Model Freelancer #1 | $10 per review | Monthly | Unlimited Freelancer #2 | $35 per original review, $20 per already created review | Monthly | Unlimited Freelancer #3 | $25 per review | Monthly | Unlimited Freelancer #4 | $25 per review | Monthly | 10 reviews Freelancer #5 | $20 per review | Monthly | Unlimited Online Reputation Management Agency | $300 subscription | Monthly | 8 reviews
Let’s dive a bit deeper into the services that Freelancer #5 offered.
Freelancer #5 explained to me he had been writing reviews for one particular company for the past 4 months now. Each month he wrote them 10 reviews.
https://preview.redd.it/n1ddox6cb20b1.png?width=2684&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=2ef0b51da38b78eefd1eff693484ee4d770f3ae6
In another message, he tells me he’s offering the same services to 5 other companies. Doing some quick math:
5 companies x 10 reviews per company x $25 per review = $1,250 per month
Considering the average person in Pakistan earns $150 per month, that’s not bad change at all.
One of the companies that he’s offering his services to includes a Y-Combinator backed startup. I won’t name the company, but here’s what its average Glassdoor review rating distribution looks like:
https://preview.redd.it/2np5b6fdb20b1.png?width=2420&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=81b9cc35226baf4ff8be0b199358958632fcdc5b
5 star reviews account for over 77% of the company’s total reviews. Obviously, no one is buying fake reviews that make them look bad.
But here’s the thing: freelancers are getting quite smart when it comes to writing reviews that don’t look too fishy. They tend to do this by spacing the reviews out (so that they don’t come in “spikes” – more on this later) and they also make sure that they’re not always leaving the “cons” section blank.
Don’t get me wrong, if you come across this company’s reviews, it’d be pretty easy to tell they’re quite strange. In fact, I can’t even post some screenshots here because it’d give the company away immediately.
But it would be challenging to conclude that the above company is buying reviews just by analyzing review volume and distribution without actually reading some of the reviews.
The same company is also buying reviews on Google Reviews.
Part III
Sidenote: I got curious about how he’s been writing 50 reviews from 50 different emails per month. Would he actually create 50 different email addresses? And what about the IP address – doesn’t Glassdoor flag multiple reviews from the same IP?
One of the freelancers answered my question:
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Moving on – another company that seems to buy fake reviews seems to be having some more trouble. Approximately a month after a freelancer linked me to fake reviews he had written for this company, all five reviews that he had linked me to had been removed:
https://preview.redd.it/99fdvcgfb20b1.png?width=3116&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=fd2e8ea258c1f8c448ce69eb55740ea0ae4ecd1a
Based on this Glassdoor webinar from 2018, “if it is found that a user has created multiple email accounts to submit reviews, then ALL submissions from that user are deleted” – so likely Glassdoor’s content moderation team flagged one of the initial reviews and the same freelancer who was writing reviews for that company had all the fake reviews deleted.
So far, it looks like the key to an effective fake review creation strategy lies in:
On that third point: the reality is that many of these freelancers’ first language is not English.
As an experiment, I turned to everybody’s favorite new toy, ChatGPT, and asked it to write me a positive Glassdoor review:
https://preview.redd.it/8w7cal9gb20b1.png?width=3164&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=40c0fee4b16081f3566ff463d629dbb8e98c9e8b
And I’d say that the above answer was better than 95% of the fake reviews I came across.
Removing reviews
The process for removing an employer review usually works like this:
As an example, Glassdoor’s Review guidelines can be found here. Mainly, they forbid mentioning anyone by name who’s not an executive and revealing proprietary or confidential information, amongst a host of other things.
Sounds simple enough right? Well, according to one of the freelancers I messaged:
https://preview.redd.it/x6s8hsyac20b1.png?width=2036&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=c4909cd57ee5052a8e29c6752b0345f3f9ccc499
After some research, I summarized the different vendors and prices in the table below:
Channel | Cost | Timeline | Model | Self reported success rate Freelancer #1 | $100 per review | 3 days | Contingency Agreement Model | 100% Freelancer #2 | $30 per review | 7 days | Contingency Agreement Model | 100% Reputation management service #2 | $450 per review | 21 business days | Contingency Agreement Model | Unknown Reputation management service #3 | $1000 per review | Undefined | Contingency Agreement Model | 100% Reputation management service #4 Plan 1 | $550 per review | 5-6 weeks | Contingency Agreement Model | 50-75% Reputation management service #4 Plan 2 | $300 Subscription + $100 per each review removed | Monthly service | Subscription plan | 50-75% Freelancer #3 | $20 | Undefined | Pay regardless | Undefined Freelancer #4 | $500 | Undefined | Contingency Agreement Model | Undefined
As you can see, unlike the fake review generation market, the prices vary quite a bit for getting reviews removed.
At one end, you have freelancers on gig marketplaces that will attempt to remove a review for less than $100. And then on the other end, you have ORMs (Online Reputation Management Agencies) that have multiple employees and more comprehensive packages in place. The one constant seems to be that most companies operate on a contingency agreement model (i.e pay only if review gets removed).