There are some things are easy to fake. I heard a story about the Bee Gees when they first got started and while I don’t know if it’s true or not it illustrates things perfectly. You need to sell a certain number of records in order to appear in the Top 40 Charts, one of the brothers figured out how many were needed and promptly bought that number of copies of the album, the record appeared in the Top 40 Charts and promptly went higher as people saw these charts, in those days they were printed weekly and displayed instore for the public to see, and bought on spec. As it turned out they were actually really good musicians but what if they weren’t? What if they were really bad musicians and had manipulated the market by getting into the Top 40? Would they be found out later and disgraced or just disappear into the bush after their first album? Don’t know, I’m not into the music industry and I’m not going to speculate but there is a case in the book industry at the moment.

It’s incredibly easy to write fake book reviews now, there are so many people on the internet and it’s really easy to create new email addresses and therefore new IDs for places such as Amazon. The thought then goes, ‘why not create some IDs, write some really glowing reviews on Amazon for my book and some really negative reviews for my competitors?’ And then someone actually did it, I won’t mention his name but you can read about it here or here. This is why when I write a review on Amazon or other places of that ilk I won’t put in five stars, I don’t want my reviews to look fake even if I’ve been given the book for the sole purpose of writing a review. My reviews are my own, warts and all, bad typing and negative reviews.

It would be very easy to create proper IDs to do this properly and just be very careful how you write and sign them to ensure you never get found out. I wonder how many of them are still there looking legit.