The Predators throw in deceptive Clutch, Sitejabber, and Bark “endorsements” to cloak their criminal enterprises with perceived credibility. “Real reviews by real people,” proclaims Trustpilot’s home page. Learn more about how we’re working to protect and promote trust online in our 2025 Trust Report.
Send the article, the clone or the URLs and a brief note — counsel reviews every intake personally and responds within one business day. A review can be fake without being defamatory, and defamatory without being fake. When Trustpilot leaves a review up that you believe is unlawful, the next step is its legal-removal channel or a counsel route, not repeated re-flagging. Flagged reviews are typically assessed within days, but the outcome is not guaranteed and harder cases sit in a back-and-forth for weeks. You can flag it to Trustpilot and challenge it on a named ground — that it is fake, defamatory, or breaches Trustpilot guidelines. Nothing in this route involves paying a reviewer or a platform for a takedown, and if a review turns out to be lawful and genuine, the honest answer is that no legal route exists and we will say so.
The bottom line is that each and every one of us wants to be able to feel confident when we’re making a purchase online. We’ve been at the forefront of fighting fake reviews and championing trust for years – in many areas, the FTC’s rules build on and reinforce the work we’ve been doing to ensure consumers and businesses have faith in online reviews. This ruling also applies to companies who collect their own reviews and aren’t using a trusted review platform. Suspicious reviews get flagged for manual investigation by their Content Integrity Team. It hosts millions of user-generated reviews and follows strict guidelines to ensure transparency, authenticity, and fairness for both consumers and businesses. Pricing plans for Podium start from $399/month, and the platform works great for multi-location brands and local businesses in North America.
The legitimate alternative that achieves the same goal, more positive reviews, is automated review collection from real customers via NPS-routed invitations, which Shopify merchants can start for free with Reviewz. As his collaborative, literary ‘Coach’ or ‘Lieutenant.’ Agnes claims that he has gypsy in his heart and rabbit in his feet. (Some companies give themselves a fake 4-star review once in awhile to make it appear to be a legitimate review). Actions like this sure make it appear that Trustpilot is siding with companies (remember those hefty monthly fees above?); not consumers. They said her review could be defamatory (even with the proof!!!) and they removed it. Their website has only been live for 6 weeks.
Common mistakes to avoid
This approach, inherited from the platform’s early days, opens the door to manipulation. This asymmetry explains why some companies display impeccably managed profiles with hundreds of recent reviews, while others appear abandoned with a few reviews dating back several months. They can proactively solicit reviews through automated invitations, respond quickly to negative feedback, and analyze satisfaction trends. Understanding these inner workings will help you develop a critical eye toward displayed ratings and more easily spot red flags that signal potential manipulation. To evaluate the credibility of reviews on Trustpilot, you first need to understand how the platform actually operates.
A paying business with an account online review management solutions manager and a flagging workflow will move reviews through disputes faster than a free account submitting tickets manually. Any consumer can write a review of any business, whether or not the business uses Trustpilot’s paid tools. Use this tool before flagging when possible. This is the tool most businesses don’t know about. Without a business account, you have almost no tools to manage your reviews.
Add the evidence the first pass missed, rather than re-flagging (which can get you penalised). For “not genuine” and personal-data flags, the reviewer gets 3 days to respond. Phone numbers, addresses, private photos, promotional links, or coordinated manipulation campaigns. The numbersThe honest answerWhat qualifiesThe 5 groundsThe flagging processWhen flagging failsReal casesWhy DIY backfiresFAQ
While some companies delete Trustpilot reviews with no trouble, there’s no guarantee that the site will remove reviews after you flag them. If you don’t have an account on Trustpilot, make sure to claim your business and create a free account. Unverified reviews are written directly without transaction verification. Especially for non-paying businesses, response times on disputed reviews can stretch into weeks.
That window can last days or weeks, and every potential customer sees the review during it. Automated detection catches most fakes before publication, but the ones that get through stay live until someone flags them and the Content Integrity team investigates. Open posting also exposes businesses to review bombing (coordinated floods of 1-star reviews) and extortion reviews (negative reviews posted to pressure a business into paying up). How Trustpilot verifies reviews, where fakes slip through, what Reddit users say, and a Stripe-verified alternative.
Identifying suspicious patterns and knowing how to respond is essential for reputation protection. The company is now filing litigation against businesses which refuse to play by the rules and fail to respond to repeated enforcement. “But as our report shows, we’re committed to stamping out bad actors and protecting the integrity of our platform.”
And if a competitor has already planted fakes on your profile, here is how to remove a fake Trustpilot review the legitimate way. The worst-case outcome (FTC investigation) compounds this. If buying reviews is illegal and detection is good, why does Googling “buy Trustpilot reviews” return dozens of “agencies” claiming to provide them? The agency did not name the companies, but the letters cite the same $53,088 figure.
Trustpilot is a popular review platform where anyone can rate a business and share their experience. Platforms like Trustpilot, where we have invested in a combination of technology, people, community, and processes to highlight genuine, authentic voices and opinions, will provide more meaningful value to consumers and businesses. It’s also important to recognize that these technologies can be used to foster greater transparency, using the technology to support and guide people online, something we’re seeing a lot of when it comes to online chat. Our dedication to a high standard of verification ensures that consumers browsing Trustpilot are able to distinguish between the different types of reviews on our platform. We design our platform for trust between consumers and businesses.
We acknowledge that automation is impactful in supporting operations at scale, but the nature of the problems that we’re solving are human. Our detection engines and our content integrity team work hand-in-hand to continually improve our approach to detecting and removing fake reviews. These are flagged to our human moderators (our “content integrity team”), who then assess the review and determine the action taken. In addition to our detection engines, we rely on our Trustpilot community of consumers and businesses who can flag any review they deem suspicious or breach our guidelines. A large part of that is our reviews, the content on our website, and the way we treat our customers, both consumers and businesses. Critically, we’re at a place where law and technology intersect in multiple different ways, and this is particularly the case for Trustpilot when it comes to building and earning trust.
Complex cases take longer, especially if Trustpilot needs the reviewer to respond. Trustpilot takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks to decide. The review stays live during the investigation. Picking the wrong category (or flagging a review just because it’s negative) gets your flag dismissed. If you haven’t already done this, verification is automatic when your email domain matches your website. Go to Trustpilot Business and claim your company profile.
