Are Reviews Faked? Trustpilot bats away claims of ignoring breaches

The international reviews service Trustpilot has batted away criticism from a property website that it ignores breaches of its guidelines.

Last week, reviews website allAgents claimed the comparison service GetAgent had “a high number of fake and misleading five-star reviews on [its] Trustpilot profile page”. It was the most recent of a number of criticisms of Trustpilot made by alAgents.

Now a Trustpilot spokesperson has told Estate Agent Today: “The suggestion that we ‘turn a blind eye’ to anyone trying to misuse reviews for their own gain, or to mislead consumers is simply not true. 

“All businesses are treated equally and must adhere to our guidelines.

“Based on the recent allegations made, which lacked any supporting evidence, our Investigations team has looked into GetAgent’s activity on the platform and we find no evidence of fabricated or fake reviews on the business’s Trustpilot profile page. 

“Our automated fraud and anomaly detection software and team of Content Integrity specialists continue to monitor GetAgent’s activity on the platform and if we find any further evidence of misuse, we will take the appropriate action.

“We have no interest in becoming involved in a dispute between allAgents and its competitors, and there is no reasonable basis or evidence justifying including Trustpilot in this response.” 

At the time of the original accusation by allAgents, GetAgent told EAT that it disputed claims that some reviews for its own services were fake, and suggested that the reviews highlighted as dubious were in fact left “for the wrong company” on the GetAgent site in error.

GetAgent chief executive Colby Short told EAT: “If a reviewer mistakenly leaves a review for the wrong company on GetAgent’s Trustpilot page we inform the reviewer and Trustpilot of this and hope that it is removed. It is not down to us to decide if that review is removed …

“This is a challenge that most companies face. allAgents themselves suffer from the same problem…

“I am extremely proud of the work that GetAgent does with over £500m worth of referrals listed with our partner agents in February alone and we intend to focus on doing ever more for vendors and our agent partners”.