With Amazon Prime Day taking place this week it has put a lot of attention on fake reviews for products online.

The problem with fake reviews has been increasing along with the growing demand for online sales. A great deal of shoppers today might not know what to look for and how to tell a fake review from the truth.

Roughly three-quarters of people who make a purchase will spend time to read reviews that have been posted about that service or product.

Both Facebook and eBay have recently been warned by the Competition and Markets Authority in the U.K. that they need to address the problem they have with fake reviews because those reviews are illegal under consumer protection law in the region.

They've allegedly found a great deal of evidence to support that both platforms are hosting a marketplace for a wide variety of misleading and fake online reviews and they want to see the companies respond in doing something about it. It's reported that both companies have insisted that they will cooperate to address those fake reviews.

Members of Congress have also recently demanded that Jeff Bezos tell them what the company is planning to do about fake reviews on their platform as well. Fraudulent reviews on Amazon have increased to more than 34 percent, according to Fakespot; a website that uses artificial intelligence to analyze the reliability of online reviews.

Can you tell the difference between what is fake or what might have been paid for?

A variety of tips have been suggested to help people stay away from those fake reviews:

• be suspicious of the product if there are a lot of positive 5-star reviews that have been posted in a short amount of time.
• consider if the review sounds natural, or if it sounds repetitive etc
• is the review too long or too short? does the reviewer repeat themselves?
• does the reviewer have any history of posting other reviews?
• know where you are more likely to see fake reviews, on what sorts of products; these can be most popular items like electronics and gadgets.

Aside from trying to figure it out for yourself, there are also sites out there like FakeSpot.com which allow you to paste the URL of the review and it analyzes it for you. The next time that you go to Amazon to make a purchase and you want to see what the reviews have to say before you make up your mind, just remember that it's estimated that roughly 34 percent of them are unreliable.

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