Fake Reviews

Online review fraud—the creation and posting of inauthentic product or service reviews—undermines consumer trust in review systems. Attackers use both human crowdsourced reviews and machine-generated text to artificially inflate (or deflate) ratings. As neural language models have improved, generating high-quality fake reviews has become tractable even for low-skill actors using pre-trained models.

Key papers

• Generating Sentiment-Preserving Fake Online Reviews Using Neural Language Models and Their Human- and Machine-based Detection — Demonstrates sentiment-preserving fake review generation using fine-tuned GPT-2; human and automated detectors struggle to distinguish from real reviews