Are There Fake Reviews on HoL?

We try our best to police who joins HoL and keep an eye on all posts including those reviewing services members have received. We're pretty confident that the vast majority of our reviews are honest ones by local people. But, as with any reviews that come from an unknown source, it is always possible that fake reviews will get through and appear on HoL. 

We police this in two ways. Firstly, we stop what look like spam accounts from joining up. Secondly, we pick up on any suspicious activity that we see and either delete suspicious comments and the accounts associated with them, or where there is no doubt, we flag up the suspicious activity by way of a reply-comment in the forum. We took this 'flagging' action just this morning.

On occasion, members alert us to their suspicions by way of a comments in the forum or a message to us. Whilst we welcome this, we are also very careful about public comments since on both moral and legal grounds we do not want to allow unfounded accusations of fake reviews to appear on the website. However, we will always take action to investigate any suspicions.

Today we have just completed our investigation of complaints on the reviews of one tradesperson. Whilst there is no conclusive evidence to show that any reviews on this person were fake, we have used our review criteria to carry out a moderation. This has resulted in about 25% of the posts on that person being deleted and a number of accounts being suspended. We are in no doubt that the majority of reviews of this person are genuine and it may well be that all were. However, there was sufficient uncertainty to lead us to take the action we did.

The essential point here is that we've got your backs to the extent that we can, and we think that the vast majority of reviews on HoL are honest and have been posted with the best of intentions. BUT, as with any reviews, it's also a case of caveat emptor.

(Please note, we want this to be a thread about the generalities of the issues. Should anyone wish to comment, please bear in mind that that any comments on this thread that name any specific reviews or tradespeople will be deleted).