Chief Executive Saoud Khalifah said phony reviews have proliferated during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has pushed most shopping online.
“Reviews are often the most important part in your assessment of a product online,” Khalifah said. “Unfortunately, sellers that engage in fraud know that.”
An analysis released last month by Fakespot of 720 million Amazon reviews from March through September found that 42% were unreliable, up from about 36% for the same period last year. Khalifah said the increase has been driven in part by the rise in online shopping during the pandemic.
Amazon, the world’s largest online retail platform, has acknowledged that sellers try to game its rating system through fake reviews. In September the company deleted 20,000 reviews after a Financial Times investigation found suspicious activity.
A good review score can help boost sales for products from third-party sellers—those not directly affiliated with Amazon—by advancing them in the search results for certain categories, such as Bluetooth headphones or phone chargers. Also, sellers can be hurt if their products are bombarded with bad reviews by people who have never actually used them.
In October, an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg News that services such as Fakespot and competitor ReviewMeta “cannot concretely determine the authenticity of a review, as they do not have access to Amazon’s propriety data such as reviewer, seller and product history.”
Khalifah said Fakespot has scanned more than 8 billion customer reviews to help its algorithm learn to spot a phony post. One clear indicator is the number of reviews compared with how long a product has been on the platform, he said. He added that there are more complicated language indicators the product scans for as well.
Khalifah launched the company six years ago from his dorm room at Monmouth University in New Jersey after being duped into buying junk products online. The company is focused on building its customer base by offering the product for free, with ads, Khalifah said. He eventually will seek to monetize the product further, he said.
The Chrome extension has 300,000 users. Millions more have used Fakespot’s website, where there is an option to directly enter URLs to check online product reviews.
The startup plans to use its new funds to expand on its 14-member staff, focusing on engineering and product development. The funding round was led by Bullpen Capital, a venture-capital firm in San Francisco that has backed FanDuel, Life360 and Zynga.
Paul Martino, managing partner at Bullpen, compared Fakespot to Honey, a browser extension that automatically applies coupon codes to online purchases. PayPal bought the company in 2019 for $4 billion.
“The problems for reviews are even more pernicious than the need to get a coupon on checkout,” Martino said. “This is a problem that will only get worse.”
