Due to the EU Directive 2019/2161, online retailers who publish fake reviews face severe penalties. The new regulations have been in force since the end of May 2022. Unfortunately, they have not had any measurable impact so far.
The most significant distributor of fake reviews on the internet is Google. The US corporation does not seem to have taken note of the new directive in European Indian territory yet. As before, anyone can maintain any number of fake accounts on Google and use these accounts to rate companies with which they have nothing whatsoever to do. There are no limits to the imagination.
As early as 19 November 2021, we warned against fake reviews published there in our Google company profile:
“Please note that most of the reviews in our Google profile are fake reviews that do not come from customers and have nothing to do with a real experience with our company. (….) On Google, anyone can publish reviews about companies even if they have nothing to do with that company and in particular are not a customer there. This practice by Google is illegal in Europe. It violates EU Directive 2019/2161 and is done against our will. We have already asked Google several times without success to refrain from this illegal practice. Genuine reviews about us are published on Trusted Shops.”
We have repeatedly requested Google to refrain from publishing fictitious reviews in connection with SoftwareFair KSP GmbH – unsuccessfully.
We therefore once again publicly distance ourselves from the fake reviews in our Google profile and call on Google to delete these reviews. We will also continue to refrain from making payments to digital protection racketeers who assume they can extract money from our pockets in supposed return for the removal of fake reviews. Instead, we rely on the power of public opinion and advise online rip-off artists:
If you need money, go to work!