How To Fool Your Way To Failure With Fake Local Business Reviews 

“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.” – C.S. Lewis

How do you feel about the aphorism fake it til you make it when it comes to getting reviews going for your local business? 

Does it sound reasonable or does a little warning bell of discomfort go off in your conscience when you consider publishing phony review content in order to launch your brand? No warning bell dinging? Another aphorism just rushed in on its heels to try to save you from making a huge business mistake: what goes around comes around. 

We recently huddled up about the necessity of learning how to recognize and report your competitors’ fake reviews so your brand isn’t left defenseless, but today we’re going to flip the coin to its other, darker side and tackle the very real temptation to become a review spammer, yourself.

If thoughts like, everybody’s doing it, no one will know, or it’s just until we start getting real reviews are ganging up to lure you into the murky waters of review fraud, I’ve got very strong armor for you today. And I’ve also got a ton of empathy for local business owners who are struggling to earn visibility in Google’s complex, competitive, and often unfair local index. Let’s pick up our shields together and walk right into this hot mess.

Risking Business Failure: The 7 Serious Consequences of Review Fraud

Defeat the temptation to publish fake reviews on behalf of your business or to pay others to do so with these facts:

1. You’ll gaslight yourself

From the time you begin creating a new local business plan until the day you retire, you will be relying on data to measure demand, growth, performance, and success. Good data will help you chart a facts-based course for your brand so that you are continuously empowered to see both problems and opportunities. Bad data, by contrast, will only ever mislead you. 

Let’s imagine that you’re entering a competitive market. You look at Google and see that your established competitors have earned hundreds or thousands of reviews, and are enjoying the ranking benefits of this. It’s a strong temptation to ignore Google’s prohibited and restricted content guidelines or the rules of any other online review platform and:

At first, you’ll start to see returns on this investment. Your rankings will go up, and your analytics will report that you’re getting more impressions and clicks. You may receive congratulatory emails from Google on your performance, and, most importantly, your fake reviews will start generating actual sales. 

But the whole scenario is built on nothing. Your data doesn’t actually represent hard-earned success – you haven’t learned what works and what doesn’t in your market, or how to serve the public, or how to budget time and marketing dollars. Faking it till you make it dooms your brand to ignorance when it comes to measuring the outcomes of your launch and early days’ performance, denying you the vital opportunity to adjust your strategy based on good data. 

Review fraudsters think they are fooling the public and online platforms, but they are actually gaslighting themselves. They are separating themselves from reality, making it impossible to see the real picture of their brand’s health and base their next good business decisions on real-world facts. 

2. Your community will catch you

From the run-up to your company’s grand opening until the day you ring up your final sale, your brand’s prime focus will be this: earning the trust and business of your local community. You’ll pursue this goal in countless ways, both online and offline, giving your all to build a trust-based relationship with the public that translates to business longevity and profits. 

And you’ll be getting off on the wrong foot if you try to jumpstart the consumer relations dynamic with fake reviews.

Let’s imagine a neighbor who has never heard of your business before, or who may have tried it a year or two ago and is considering returning for a second transaction. They encounter your Google Business Profile (GBP) and your glowing fake reviews, and something about it just feels off to them. If they’re a bit naive about the web, perfect 5-star profiles may just seem a bit too flawless to be real, and they may look elsewhere for a business that looks a little more “real”. And if they’re super-savvy and already know how to spot the warning signs of review spam, they may begin doing Google’s job for them by flagging fishy-looking review content. 

Whether or not Google starts taking your reviews down as a result of public flagging is beside the point. The real consequence is that you’ve lost the public’s trust. Look at this data from our recent consumer review survey to see how big of a problem your fake reviews can create:

• Over 99% of North American consumers read reviews before making local transactions
• 59% are reading even more reviews today than they did 5 years ago
• 37% say they frequently encounter suspicious reviews

That final stat is a huge number when you picture four out of ten of your neighbors feeling unable to trust local businesses like yours because they see them trying to fool the community. You’ll lose both your good name and profit potentials if the public thinks you’re trying to trick them, and if the public starts reporting you to Google for fraud, things can get very bad for your business quickly, but we’ll come to that in a minute.

3. Your local business allies will catch you

In your effort to earn links, citations, good local press, and to become a household word in your hometown, one of your strongest strategies will be to partner up with your local business peers for cross-promotion and community projects.

For example, let’s imagine that your family has just launched a catering company and needs to earn lucrative contracts for prestigious events like weddings and banquets in order to become profitable. How will you secure these bookings? By becoming a strong contributor to the relevant local business community. You’ll be building relationships with nearby event centers, florists, houses of worship, wedding clothiers, DJs, event planners, and other professionals so that you can contribute to a steady referral network in your town or city. 

Each of your colleagues will need to feel that they can recommend your catering business in good faith. After all, they’ll be tying their good name to yours when they refer clients to you. If they’re scrupulous about their own reputations, they will check out yours online after you introduce yourself. If they see signs that you are engaging in review fraud, you could find yourself permanently outside the local commercial circle, gossiped about as an untrustworthy peer, and reported to Google or even to the law. More on this to come.

4. Your local business competitors will catch you

I’m always a proponent of turning direct local business competitors into allies by finding gaps in one another’s menu of offerings so that referrals can happen. For example, your catering company might only do large events and earn the recommendations of a fellow caterer who specializes in small parties and vice-versa. But, there will be many cases in which a nearby company is too similar to yours to ever be seen as anything but a straight-up competitor. 

If they are on the ball, their marketers will constantly be on the lookout for signs of Google Business Profile spam getting in the way of their online visibility goals. They will be manually and programmatically monitoring the search engine results for signs of the following:

• Any business in the market that is engaging in review spam to promote themselves
• Any business in the market that is engaging in review spam to harm competitors

Your savviest competitors will quickly recognize suspicious review practices and have the power to report your business to Google and the authorities. You will also be handing them the invaluable opportunity to acquire your customers by legitimately presenting themselves as the most trustworthy business in town.  

5. Google et. al will catch you

Things are starting to get pretty scary now. In addition to accepting review fraud reports from the public, Google devotes annual budgets to catching review fraud both manually and algorithmically. Here are the consequences you may suffer if you publish reviews that violate their guidelines:

• Your reviews can be removed, meaning that all of your efforts surrounding their publication have been a waste of time and money.
• Your local search rankings will then drop due to the loss of reviews.
• Your GBP can be stamped with a public warning label stating that your business has been caught spamming, after which only 14% of consumers will even consider doing business with you. 
• Your listing can be suspended or disabled, with no guarantee that your efforts to recover from these punitive actions will succeed.
• Your Google account can be suspended, with no guarantee that you can recover it.

Any or all of these outcomes make it clear that trying to fake your way to visibility can have the exact opposite result: being shamed or even invisible in Google’s local search results. Few local businesses can succeed without a strong Google presence these days. Review fraud is a very real threat to your brand’s viability. 

6. The government will catch you

Now we’re really in trouble. Review fraud can lead to litigation. If your brand becomes involved in a lawsuit, the penalties can be devastating. Most nations have some form of consumer protection laws. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final ruling in August of 2024 prohibiting:

• Fake reviews and testimonials
• Buying positive or negative reviews
• Insider reviews and testimonials
• Misrepresenting company-controlled reviews
• Review suppression
• Misuse of fake social media indicators

For a small local business, this would almost certainly lead to bankruptcy and closure. While slogans like “fake it till you make it” can make review spam seem a little like a game, a growing record of lawsuits underlines what’s really at stake for any business owner who is tempted to engage in this form of fraud. 

7. The media will catch you

Small-to-enterprise businesses close every day due to a variety of problems including general economic pressure, and there is certainly life after a business fails. However, a final piece of your armor against the temptation to engage in review fraud is that your personal reputation is tied to your business reputation in your community.

If your brand becomes the subject of legal penalties due to review fraud, it is likely that the story will be picked up by the media. While the size of the business is likely to predicate whether the story makes national or only local news, even a single embarrassing story in a tiny community paper can make it hard to hold up your head in town. It could affect your chances of securing loans or partners for future business ventures, and could be a source of longstanding shame for you and your loved ones. 

I don’t enjoy pointing the finger at well-documented media reporting of business owners being punished for review fraud. You can find abundant examples of it if you look it up. The truth is that I feel sorry when I encounter these cases because I know that, somewhere along the line, the business owner got the wrong idea in their head about how to succeed. I hope that these 7 potential consequences of review fraud will defend you from courting these risks, but I do also want to look the temptation in the face to see where it comes from. 

Review fraud might be tempting you if…

You see your competitors getting away with it – You’re right, they are getting away with it for now. But don’t imitate them. Report them.

You understand that Google’s system is overwhelmed with spam, and you might be able to get away with it – You’re right, Google is overwhelmed and is not taking enough action to defend their own product from fraud. You’re also right that you could get away with publishing fake reviews for weeks, months, or years, but this means that every day is one on which you could wake up to penalties, warning labels on your GBPs, lawsuits, and business closure. It is simply not worth the risk.

Also, bear in mind that Google could get better at detection in future. They keep signalling that they understand that review fraud is a serious issue. Just a week or two ago, they sent out the following email:

With AI on the verge of making Google’s review corpus a really dubious space, there’s reason to predict that Google will ramp up its fraud detection programs.

Your economic reality is desperate, and you need to make money right away – This is the hardest scenario, but the promise of getting rich quick is a lie. Try to find a Buy Local association or other community business organization to discover whether you can legitimately support yourself and your dependents with your business idea, based on the lived experiences of nearby peers. If your plan is unlikely to deliver the income you need within a short time frame, you may need to work multiple jobs while you get your small business off the ground. 

You are anxious that customers won’t take the time to review you so that you can start competing in the search engine results – Facts are the most reassuring things in this case. According to our survey of over 1,200 consumers, 72% of people write reviews as a reward for great customer service, so focus on delighting your customers. 14% are motivated to write a review simply because you asked them. And 83% are at least somewhat responsive to review requests. GatherUp can help you create a professional reputation management program, including a plan for ongoing review acquisition so that you are receiving a continuous stream of legitimate reviews. 

You believe everyone cheats in business – Lots of people do cheat, you’re right. But new business ventures require hope and enthusiasm. If you know that pessimism tends to shape your outlook, you might want to speak to other local business owners whom you consider honest, and listen carefully to whatever they’re willing to tell you about how they succeeded. You may be surprised by just how much elbow grease and day-after-day effort to earn the public’s trust has gone into it. 

You’ve benefited from cheating in the past – It could have been at school or in a previous business venture that you enjoyed the rewards of undetected cheating, but here’s the thing: the online dynamic makes everything public. In the past, customer complaints were typically private, and largely controlled by the business. Now, they happen publicly, in online reviews, social media, 24-hour news cycles, etc.  If I can teach you one thing with my column today, it’s that success is best built on trusting relationships within your community. Even if you cheated in the past, your new business venture can be your chance to make a fresh start, take the high road, and feel the
substantial rewards of honestly earning success. 

You fear your business plan isn’t solid enough to stand on its own – You could be right, if you’re
worrying about this. Access as much data as you can about which business models fail and succeed in your community, what consumer demand looks like in your market, what level of investment you will need to make before you begin seeing a return. Don’t put yourself in the position of being tempted to paper over the cracks of a business plan that isn’t ready for prime time by faking reviews. Instead, delay launching until you feel reasonably confident in your plan and marketing strategy and pay close attention to this advice: don’t try to earn too many reviews at once, because that may look suspicious to Google and result in review removal. Set a healthy goal of earning a gradual, steady stream of fresh incoming reviews over time for the life of your business. 

Summing up

Local business owners exist within a framework of community trust. People like you supply neighbors’ wants and needs in good times and bad. When you operate in local, your work really matters.

There are countless temptations to take shortcuts to success, especially because you are under the pressure to support yourself and your loved ones. You’ll see competitors getting away with bad practices, and marketers will approach you with offers of review fraud for a low price. 

Seeing all this clearly is crucial. Trust takes a long time to earn, but can be lost very quickly. A business that is based in fooling the public ends up fooling itself and the consequences can be severe. How much better it is to don appropriate armor and get out there into your community, determined to earn an authentic reputation for honest business practices and amazing customer service over time. It’s the hard way, but it’s the good one.  

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