Review Fraud is on the rise! It is also known as astroturfing, and it basically means you can't trust everything you read because some reviews are fake. Company employees or owners are obviously biased, but they post reviews to boost traffic. Even worse, they may hire "black-hat" companies to post stellar reviews to improve ratings. There have been several high-profile cases, such as the Amazon review-jacking scheme by Belkin and Apple banning thousands of apps. In these cases, the purpotrators were caught, but there are likely a huge number of fake reviews that go undiscovered and unpunished.

Recently I was checking out some restaurant reviews on one of the mass-review sites, and found for a certain restaurant that lots of the reviews seemed a bit strange. Many of the reviewers had only posted a single review, and lots of them gave 5 out of 5 stars with only short explanations. I dug a little deeper, pasted some text into google, and that several of these reviews were also posted for different restaurants with the exact same text!

Don't trust those review sites! Restaurants hire unscrupulous people to post fake reviews so you'll visit their restaurant!

To do something about it, I came up with the idea for NC-Reviews. Here, I'll post well-written, independent, and TRUSTWORTHY reviews so you know you're getting an honest opinion. When you want sound advice from real people, check out NC-Reviews!