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Comment by marwann | Hacker News Reader

In France, an agency created a fake company selling kebap sandwich on Mars. They had 105.000 views on their video, 46k followers, 20k facebook fans...and orders.

What's scary isn't the fact people buy fake reviews/followers/etc. but the fact people actually believe in these vanity metrics and want to order afterwards.

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To be fair, almost the entire advertising industry is built around trying to effectively lie to people.

True that :( I've worked in the industry during 3 years before figuring that out! The problem is mostly for platforms to find a way of identifying which reviews are real or fake, depending on IP, rate of reviews, recency of the user, etc.

Reviews aren't actually a bad source of information if you are ordering on line. If you can't check it out directly what else can you go on that is better? I tend to look at the negative reviews which probably have not been paid for and see if they seem that bad or not.

Anecdotal, but I've been aware of this fake review industry for probably about 6 years and I am amazed that almost everyone I talk to does not believe the scale and the scope. They think there might be one or two fake reviews on an Amazon product when in reality it can be closer to 15 out of 18. Or in some cases every single one.

People who are seriously doing this aren't paying $5 a review. They are paying $100-$500. At this point I just assume almost all reviews are fake. Especially on Amazon and to a slightly lesser extent Yelp.

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