STONY BROOK, NY, June 21, 2012 

There has been a lot of speculation and anecdotal evidence about the prevalence of deceptive product reviews i.e., fictitious customer reviews that are written by the property owners to sound authentic in order to boost their ratings and promote the business. Computer analysis spots the fingerprints that fraudulent raters leave behind. The technique is "able to pinpoint where the densities of false reviews are for any given hotel," says Yejin Choi, an assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook, who carried out the work with colleagues. Researchers from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, have come up with a scientific method of detecting whether someone has been posting fake reviews online.