A review is only worth reading if it is real. For over two decades, our job has been to keep Hellopeter a place where the reviews you read come from real people who had a real experience. Here is how we protect that, and what you can do to help.

What We Mean by a Fake Review

A fake review is one that isn't based on a real, first-hand experience. In practice that covers a few things:

• A review written by someone who never actually dealt with the business.
• A business writing reviews about itself, or paying for positive reviews.
• Fake negative reviews planted by a competitor, or a coordinated push to drive a rating up or down.

It is worth being clear about what a fake review is not. An honest negative review is not fake. A one-star complaint from a real customer is exactly the kind of feedback the platform exists for, and we never treat criticism as fraud.

How We Spot Fake Reviews

We work in layers, because no single check catches everything.

• Real accounts. To post on the website you sign in, and to post over WhatsApp you message us from your own number. That makes it much harder to mass-produce reviews from nowhere.
• Automated monitoring. Custom software watches for unusual review activity, like a sudden burst of reviews or patterns that don't look like normal customer behaviour.
• Manual checks. Our team looks into activity that gets flagged, whether by the software or by the community.
• Community flagging. Anyone can report a review they believe is fake or against our guidelines. Some of our strongest signals come from real users who can tell when something looks off.

What Happens When a Review Is Questioned

When a review is reported or looks suspicious, we don't simply take it down or leave it up. We check it.

1. We contact the reviewer and ask them to confirm the review is truthful and based on a real first-hand experience.
2. If they can't or won't confirm it, the review comes down.
3. If a business keeps disputing a review the reviewer stands behind, we ask the reviewer for a sworn affidavit before we republish it.

This cuts both ways on purpose. It protects honest reviewers from businesses trying to silence them, and it protects honest businesses from false reviews and competitor sabotage. You can read the full process in How Reporting and Moderation Works on Hellopeter.

Why We Don't Just Delete Bad Reviews

The easiest way to fake a clean reputation would be to delete every complaint. We don't do that. Over 25 years we have published millions of complaints, many of which businesses did not want online. A review only comes down when it breaks our content guidelines, never simply because it is negative.

Paying Us Doesn't Buy a Cleaner Profile

This is one we get asked about a lot, so it is worth being clear. Some people assume a paid plan is a way to control reviews. It is the opposite. A paid plan is a set of marketing tools that help a business earn and show off a good reputation, and there are a lot of them.

Those tools are things like:

• Collecting more reviews from real customers, for example by inviting them over WhatsApp after a purchase.
• Replying and managing feedback from one dashboard, including managing their Google reviews from inside Hellopeter.
• Showing their reviews off on their own website with widgets and social-proof badges, and pulling their Google reviews in alongside them.
• Turning reviews into marketing, like building social media ads from real customer reviews.
• Connecting their rating to Google, so their Hellopeter star rating can show up in Google search results, Google's AI summaries, and the other AI tools people increasingly use to decide who to trust.
• Understanding their customers through our AI analysis of customer feedback, which shows them what people are actually saying and where to improve.

That is what a business pays for. None of it lets them move a review up, down, or off the platform. Reviews are published and moderated the same way for everyone, free or paid.

What You Can Do

If you see a review you believe is fake:

• Use the Report button below the review and tell us why.
• The review is then flagged for investigation on our side.

And if your own honest review is ever challenged, reply to our confirmation email so we can verify it and keep it up. Removed reviews don't count toward a business's TrustIndex or star rating, so flagging a fake genuinely keeps the score honest.

Real reviews are the whole point. The more of us who keep them honest, the more useful Hellopeter is for everyone.