Fake Reviewer Group Detection in Online Review Systems

Online review systems are important components in influencing customers’ purchase decisions. To manipulate a product’s reputation, many stores hire large numbers of people to produce fake reviews to mislead customers. Previous methods tackle this problem by detecting malicious individuals, ignoring the fact that the spam activities are often formed in groups, where individuals work collectively to write fake reviews. Fake reviewer group detection, however, is more challenging due to the difficulties in capturing the underlying relationships in groups. In this work, we present an unsupervised and end-to-end approach for fake reviewer group detection in online reviews. Specifically, our method can be summarized into two procedures. First, cohensive groups are detected with modularity-based graph convolutional networks. Then the suspiciousness of each group is measured by several anomaly indicators from both individual and group levels. The fake reviewer groups can be finally detected through suspiciousness. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world datasets, and the results show that our proposed method is effective in detecting fake reviewer groups compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.