Understanding the process of writing fake online reviews

Although the prevalence of fake online reviews for products and services is deemed to have become an epidemic, little is known about the strategies used to write such bogus entries. Hence, this paper conducts an exploratory study to understand the process by which fake reviews are written. Participants were invited to write fake reviews for hotels in a research setting. Thereafter, they were asked to answer a questionnaire which solicited qualitative responses about their strategies. Results indicate that the process of writing fake reviews commences with extensive information gathering via common review websites such as TripAdvisor as well as search engines such as Google. The gathered information is then used as cues to write short, catchy and succinct fake review titles, as well as informative and subjective fake review descriptions. Adequate efforts are generally invested to blur the lines between fake reviews and authentic entries.

[1]  Fred Bronner,et al.  Vacationers and eWOM: Who Posts, and Why, Where, and What? , 2011 .

[2]  Bing Liu,et al.  Opinion spam and analysis , 2008, WSDM '08.

[3]  J. Darley,et al.  A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects. , 1983 .

[4]  Seounmi Youn,et al.  Online Word-of-Mouth (or Mouse): An Exploration of Its Antecedents and Consequences , 2006, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[5]  Duncan Simester,et al.  Deceptive Reviews : The Influential Tail , 2013 .

[6]  P. Chatterjee,et al.  Online Reviews: Do Consumers Use Them? , 2006 .

[7]  N. Hoffart.  Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory , 2000 .

[8]  Ulrike Gretzel,et al.  What's in a Travel Review Title? , 2012, ENTER.

[9]  Daniel Dor,et al.  On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers , 2003 .

[10]  Junhui Wang,et al.  Detecting group review spam , 2011, WWW.

[11]  Derek Greene,et al.  Merging multiple criteria to identify suspicious reviews , 2010, RecSys '10.

[12]  Pradeep Racherla,et al.  Factors affecting consumers' trust in online product reviews , 2012 .

[13]  Chong Long,et al.  Uncovering collusive spammers in Chinese review websites , 2013, CIKM.

[14]  L. Gillam,et al.  “I Don’t Know Where He is Not”: Does Deception Research yet Offer a Basis for Deception Detectives? , 2012 .

[15]  Rachel Greenstadt,et al.  Detecting Hoaxes, Frauds, and Deception in Writing Style Online , 2012, 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[16]  Alton Yeow-Kuan Chua,et al.  A study of manipulative and authentic negative reviews , 2014, ICUIMC.

[17]  R. Law,et al.  Profiling the Users of Travel Websites for Planning and Online Experience Sharing , 2012 .

[18]  Pei-Wen Wang,et al.  Analysis of Internet word of mouth regarding Taiwan's resort hotels , 2010, The 3rd International Conference on Information Sciences and Interaction Sciences.

[19]  Kyung Hyan Yoo,et al.  Comparison of Deceptive and Truthful Travel Reviews , 2009, ENTER.

[20]  Claire Cardie,et al.  Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination , 2011, ACL.

[21]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  Lying Words: Predicting Deception from Linguistic Styles , 2003, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[22]  Klaus Krippendorff,et al.  Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology , 1980 .

[23]  A. Strauss,et al.  The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research aldine de gruyter , 1968 .

[24]  Q. Ye,et al.  Determinants of Customer Satisfaction in the Hotel Industry: An Application of Online Review Analysis , 2013 .

[25]  Marcia K. Johnson,et al.  Reality Monitoring , 2005 .

[26]  Shay David,et al.  Six degrees of reputation: The use and abuse of online review and recommendation systems , 2006, First Monday.