It should be quite obvious that most of the reviews on PriceGrabber for Tiger Direct, PCNation, MacMall, CompUSA, TheNerds.net, CostCentral, and I'm sure many other merchants, are fakes posted on their behalf. There is probably a third party these merchants pay.
How can you tell? It's the combination of two things:
1) Almost all of the reviews were the first and only reviews posted by their reviewers, and
2) Almost all of those reviewers became PriceGrabber members between 1-3 weeks (average around 10 days) BEFORE posting their review.
This makes no sense. Few people will sign up on a website that far ahead of posting a review, especially if it's that person's first review. If those were real reviews, people would become PriceGrabber members right before posting their review. Of course, some people may sign longer before their first review to use other PriceGrabber member features; but the fact that it is almost always 1-3 weeks before the first review points to a pattern that would be illogical if these reviews were real.
I'm sure what happens with these fake reviews is that the people who are hired by these merchants sign up for PriceGrabber accounts in batches (or sign up automatically using "bots") to use later for their fake reviews, and it takes them on average 1-3 weeks between signing up for their PriceGrabber account and posting their fake review.
You can confirm this by looking at the PriceGrabber reviews for Amazon.com. Amazon obviously does not need to pay people for positive ratings, and lo and behold: almost all reviewers signed up for their PriceGrabber account on the same day they posted their review or they became members a long time ago and have posted reviews before.
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