Alchemer’s 2026 Retail Report shows 70% of retail consumers check online product and service reviews before making a purchase. Of that number, 42% “suspect the reviews they read are fake or AI-generated, 40.6% suspect they’re paid or incentivized and 32.5% think brands manipulate them,” the report stated.
Data from a recent Forbes study tells a similar story. The publisher’s survey shows 49% of U.S. consumers say there are “too many fake reviews”, and that 86% of respondents are “concerned about AI-generated reviews.”
Fraud specialists say fake five-star reviews are easy to post, especially with AI, and hard to verify.
“Fake online reviews are now an industry with its own supply chain,” Dr. Nicola Harding, a criminologist and chief scientific officer of Tuteliq, a fraud detection services company, told Moneywise. “There are review brokers, paid reviewer networks, ‘review for refund’ schemes and, more and more, automated content farms.”
One big problem is that nobody can measure the scale of review fraud precisely, because the best fakes are never caught. “The World Economic Forum has estimated that fake reviews influence around $152 billion of global online spending each year,” Harding stated.
Online scammers benefit from how fake reviews are structured, since they’re basically social proof. “When we can’t touch a product or meet a contractor, we hand our judgment to strangers,” Harding said. “A five-star rating feels like the crowd has already done the checking for us.”
From a criminological point of view, that’s the ideal setup for a fraudster: a motivated offender, a willing target and no capable guardian in the gap between them. “The review stands in for that guardian, so when the review is fake, the protection disappears,” Harding added.
These red lights suggest a review scam is in play
Fact-checking five-star online reviews is difficult, but doable, especially if you follow these clues.
Look for details, not enthusiasm
Details don’t prove authenticity, “but generic enthusiasm provides little useful evidence,” Dave Hatter, a cybersecurity consultant at Cincinnati-based Intrust IT, told Moneywise. “And look at the pattern over time, not one review or a small number of reviews over a short time range.”
Be skeptical about ‘verified purchase’ claims
Verified purchase claims in digital reviews can be useful; they don’t guarantee the opinion itself is trustworthy.
“Verified purchase verifies something about the transaction,” Hatter noted. “It shouldn’t be interpreted by consumers as Amazon personally certifying that everything the reviewer wrote is true.”
Reviews with no story in them.
Watch out for phrases like ‘great product, highly recommend’ that could fit anything. “Genuine customers mention specifics: the delivery, how they installed it, what went wrong and how it got fixed,” Harding said.
No complaint responses included
Online reviews with multiple five stars but almost nothing in the middle, plus no replies from the seller to any complaint, should give buyers pause. “Honest businesses get some bad reviews and answer them,” Jonathan Solis, founder at Whisker Bark, a Miami-based dog mobility retailer, told Moneywise.
Be scrupulous about AI-generated reviews
AI has removed the two things that used to give fake reviews away: cost and clumsy wording.
