Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

Posted by doppio19 7/1/2025

Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews(blog.truestar.pro)

416 points | 273 commentspage 2

quitit 7/2/2025|

Some online retailers (such as galaxus for those in Europe) include return statistics on the sale page against comparison brands as well as price history graphs. This helps stamp out two of the core complaints about amazon: fake reviews and fraudulent discounts.

zdragnar 7/2/2025|

If you look around, you'll see products on Amazon occasionally marked as "frequently returned". It has steered me away from a few purchases.

Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.

zulban 7/2/2025||

If you have to buy a back massage in bulk as backups, doesn't that means it's crap quality? Are your standards that low?

alister 7/2/2025||

There's a discoverability problem with this tool because I've never heard of Fakespot or Mozilla Review Checker until today.

> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.

If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).

xnx 7/1/2025||

Did Fakespot work? I can't see how it would stand a chance against LLM generated reviews without even having the log (keystroke?) data that Amazon does.

burnt-resistor 7/2/2025||

Better than nothing. Not sure how well it worked or if it used any particularly advanced AI similarity checker or sentiment analysis.

It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.

bb88 7/2/2025|||

The last year it's been a mixed bag.

One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.

The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.

Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.

doppio19 7/1/2025||

I found that it did a pretty decent job. Certainly not 100% accurate, but it often picked up on signals that made me give a closer look at a listing than I would have otherwise.

I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.

markrages 7/1/2025||

I think a lot of real reviews are written by ChatGPT. People are lazy!

FakeFind_ai 7/8/2025||

Fakespot paved the way — respect to 9 years of helping shoppers stay informed. At FakeFind, we’re building on that mission with AI that digs even deeper into review authenticity across Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and more. The fight against fake reviews isn’t over. If your interested: https://fakefind.ai

gadders 7/2/2025||

I saw an instagram ad the other day offering to buy established Reddit accounts, presumably so that can post fake reviews.

I also got offered some money over telegram to review a hotel from a large chain and leave a positive review.

is_true 7/2/2025|

Governments should block Instagram and Facebook until they start doing something about ads about ilegal offerings.

I've seen ads selling fake clothes, real clothes but with a fake store, money exchange scams, and a few others.

immibis 7/2/2025||

Governments should block Instagram and Facebook. Period. No takesie backsides. And Google, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Hacker News, ....

UberFly 7/2/2025||

My own form of Amazon punishment for allowing fake reviews is to send back their falsely reviewed crap on their own dime. If they want to save $$ they should clean up the review process.

aucisson_masque 7/2/2025|

What about things that break after a while, when you can’t anymore send it back ?

account42 7/2/2025||

Reviews don't work well for those anyway since the product will have been discontinued by then and replaced with a slightly different one.

smusamashah 7/2/2025||

Their privacy policy / licence allowed collection of passwords and whatnot. Copying from older comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38204923

https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy

Look at Section 2B

  B. Personal Information Collected Automatically
  We may collect personal information automatically when you use our Services.

  Automatic Collection of Personal Information.

  We may collect the following information automatically when you use our Services:
  Contact Information:
  Your email address
  Identifiers:
  User ID: Such as screen name, handle, account ID, or other user- or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular user or account. This information could be provided via your Fakespot account, Apple ID, Google Account, or other accounts you may use on the Services. User ID also includes your account password, other credentials, security questions, and confirmation codes.

  Device ID: Your device information which includes, but is not limited to, information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device.

  Usage Data:
  Product Interaction: How you interact with our Services and what features you use within the Services, including Fakespot’s sort bar, highlights, review grade, seller ratings, alternative sellers, settings and popups.

  Other Usage Data: Individual web pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Service, and other information about how you interact with the Service.

  Browser Information: Information your internet browser provides when you access and use our Services.

  Application Search History: Information you provide when you perform searches in our Services.

  Purchase Information: Your purchase history or purchase tendencies which we may use to recommend better products and sellers.

  Location Information. We may collect your location information, such as geolocation based on your IP address in connection with your use of our Services.

  Publicly Available Information. In providing our Services we may collect data (including personal information such as profile names of reviewers) that is made publicly available via the internet on the websites analyzed and crawled by our Services.

ravenstine 7/1/2025||

I've never even heard of it, yet it was acquired by Mozilla? Seems like the problem is right in front of them; they didn't really try.

PUSH_AX 7/2/2025||

There is one clear route to solving this problem and I already pay money to get it, it's an independent third party consumer review site.

They are good at objectively evaluating consumer products, they simply buy all the main models of a thing and review them all. I trust them (which is very important in this space). I happily pay for this service.

micromacrofoot 7/2/2025|

AI has made it completely impossible to detect fake reviews now, so it would have died naturally. Amazon (and other retailers) has the access to heuristics on their end that could help with fake review detection that fakespot doesn't, but it's likely a very low priority for them (if it is one at all)

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