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Some fake reviewers are easy to spot: If they don't have a profile picture, that's a red flag. If someone is actually eating at 12 different restaurants a week and leaving reviews for all of them, they're either going through a really rough time in their personal life or it's a fake account. Finally, keep an eye out for the stars themselves. If a place has all five stars, there's a good chance they're not only fake but also that they suck at this.

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Nobody's so hard-up for entertainment that glow-in-the-dark cable cords rock their world.

The closest I've ever come to getting outed was the time I had to write a review of a restaurant's buffalo chicken pizza -- specifically mentioning how great it was that this joint used barbecue sauce instead of pizza sauce. What a revelation!

Businesses often go into review sections with the sole intention of promoting something. If you see a dozen reviews in a row mentioning the same product or service, there's a good chance that the place paid for those reviews, trying to hype their new buffalo chicken milkshake ("It's got barbecue sauce instead of milk!") or something. But every single other review was about how awful that particular pizza was. It's highly unlikely that I was just a giant fan of food poisoning, so people caught on, and I panicked when folks started asking if I was a plant. I've seen other paid reviewers get banned for less than that.