Fake review sellers are huge problem on the app store.
They often contact app developers directly via email trying to sell fake reviews.
It would be great if Shopify had an email address that we could forward these emails to for action / follow-up.
Many of the requests come through via the ‘Get support’ button on the App store listing pages so the emails we could forward also include the offending stores myshopify urls.
This might make it easier for the Shopify to provide some automated processing of the forwarded emails to then take action a bit quicker.
The current process of reporting a merchant / partner has far too much friction to do every day.
Totally get that. Shopify currently have automated processing for initial submissions for their DMCA forms.
I imagine something similar would be possible for evaluating and logging the incoming forwarded emails, then assessing which repeating offenders appear in the emails (and assessing which Partners the emails are coming from) + escalating to a human to review where they are deemed legitimate reports.
So much work is going into making reviews ‘trustworthy’ and relevant on the app store, but there are no tools to actually report fake review solicitations which are a huge part of that problem.
Hey @Anthony_SL, currently the report forms are the formal process to report this.
I see that this can be annoying and simply forwarding these emails would be easier. I’ll pass this suggestion on. We do already do that for phishing emails.
Just a thought, if you’re working with any MCP tools I’ve played around a bit with some browser tools (like browser-mcp) and you could likely offload some of that toil with a tool like that.
This was recently brought up here as well and something we are looking in to
Did anything ever come of this? I woke up to six new ones this morning — all within about 12 hours. The fake review problem is really getting out of hand!
It’s pretty clear that a lot of apps are taking advantage of these offers, so maybe collecting the associated emails would be a good starting point for Shopify to take action?
Hey @Ollie_autoBlogger, have you noticed an increase lately? The reason I ask is I see Daryl has also re-posted recently so there’s potentially a new spike or increased activity lately?
If you can help me identify any new behaviours or anything new in these ones coming through that maybe wasn’t in past emails I will definitely pass that on to our security teams.
I’ve been saving most of the fake review emails I get (since around July), in the hope that Shopify might eventually make use of them. I’ve received roughly seventy since then, which is about one every couple of days, but it has recently jumped to around three to six a day. They’re always the same thing, people offering five star reviews and installs to game Shopify’s app search. Some come through the official Shopify support request channel, and others are completely cold emails. It really feels like there should be a proper place to forward these so the accounts can be banned, and ideally so Shopify can start working out who is actually taking advantage of these offers.
As for apps using fake reviews, it has always been an issue, but it does seem to be getting worse. In my view Shopify isn’t doing nearly enough to stop it. I can imagine some previously honest partners now feel pressured to cave and buy fake reviews, because how else are they meant to compete when they might get one or two genuine reviews a week, while another app somehow picks up ten or twenty obviously fabricated ones without any consequences.
I’m more than happy to help in any way I can, but ultimately Shopify needs to step in. It’s a compounding problem and it already affects both store owners and the developers who are trying to do things properly. I’ll keep putting on friendly pressure where I can and will keep thinking up ways to bring the problem into the public eye.
