They arrive in clusters — the one-star reviews from accounts that never bought anything, reciting grievances no customer had, sometimes traceable to a competitor, an ex-employee, or one person with many accounts. Fake reviews sit at a legal junction — and the effective response uses every road that meets there.
The Three Roads
Defamation: false statements of fact damaging the business — the fabricated transaction, the invented incident — are actionable; honest opinion from real customers is not, and knowing the line keeps the response credible. Platform policy: every major review platform prohibits inauthentic reviews, and properly framed complaints — the policy identified, the inauthenticity evidenced (no matching transaction, account patterns, timing clusters) — get action the report button doesn’t; this is usually the fastest road, worked first. Harassment and identification: coordinated campaigns can ground restraint on the pattern evidence, and the Norwich Pharmacal machinery reaches the accounts that matter where the source is worth pursuing — the competitor unmasked faces a very different conversation to the anonymous account.
The Commercial Triage
Honest proportion runs through every one of these files: document everything first (screenshots, dates, account details, the absence of matching transactions — the evidence pack serves every road); weigh attention costs — some campaigns die faster from starvation than from litigation that feeds them oxygen, and the public legal battle can amplify what it fights; and match the response to the damage — the strong letter to an identified author ends many cases, platform enforcement handles many more, and proceedings are reserved for the campaigns whose scale and defiance justify them. That triage — which roads, in what order, at what cost — is the first conversation’s work.
The wider commercial picture: reputation attacks on businesses often travel with other disputes — the departing employee, the commercial falling-out — and the firm’s company practice backs these files where they widen. Full terrain: Defamation & Harassment Injunctions.
A review campaign underway? Evidence first, then the roads: 01 5827148.