There has been a study done by Duncan Simester of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Eric Anderson of Northwestern University, which examined 325,000 reviews written about an apparel company. An estimate was made that for nearly 16,000 reviews (about 5 percent) the customer had not bought the item. They also noted that these reviews skewed much more negativethan the others.

Their study revealed an unexpected source of “fake” negative online reviews. For every 1,000 customers about 15 of them write reviews and one is writing negative reviews of products that customer never purchased.

The result was,” Never place your trust in reviews. What seems to be the voice of the masses is the voice of a few, magnified and distorted.”