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.
Note: For more content like this, subscribe to my newsletter. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be releasing my guide to writing a killer resume.
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:
https://preview.redd.it/g4id2yqeb20b1.png?width=2572&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=6259b9383e789d3842a682905fc8ada1e3debfaa
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).