No one loves you like you love you, or so the common saying goes, often followed by admonitions that, if you don't toot your own horn, no one else will. But such a practice—especially in online marketing—may be riskier than some might expect, especially in New York, where regulators are bringing out the biggest crackdown yet in deceptive reviews posted online.

The crackdown focuses on fully 19 different companies that have agreed to both stop practices of issuing misleading reviews about themselves as well as pay a combined total of $350,000 in penalties for doing so. The crackdown came about as part of an investigation going back a year, and includes a variety of firms—from a laser hair removal service to a charter bus company, as well as a variety of “reputation enhancement firms” that threw in fraudulent reviews in several places.

New York's attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, explains the state's position for going after such reviews, saying, “What we've found is even worse than old-fashioned false advertising. When you look at a billboard, you can tell it’s a paid advertisement—but on Yelp (News - Alert) or Citysearch, you assume you’re reading authentic consumer opinions, making this practice even more deceiving.” Indeed, Schneiderman had cause for alarm; posing as the owner of a yogurt shop who claimed to fall victim to a set of unfair reviews, he discovered that good reviews could be had in rapid fashion for little money as operations across the world—Bangladesh, Eastern Europe and others—were willing to offer up praise for as little as a dollar a good review, despite having never set foot in such a place.

What's more, there were discoveries that these operations were offering bribes, like $50 gift certificates, for other users to write good reviews, or going on review sites to counter charges that these operations wrote fake reviews by writing more fake reviews.

Good reviews mean good business. With an increasing number of choices available for consumers, in everything from smartphones to sandwich shops, good reviews can often spur business toward a location just as much as bad reviews can spur business to competitors. Indeed, a 2011 study from Harvard Business School suggested that, by raising an average rating on Yelp by just one star, that restaurant would see revenues go up 5 to 9 percent. With that kind of money at stake, it's small surprise that a business would turn to fake reviews to get the word out and make it stick. Indeed, some businesses are getting increasingly sophisticated, using multiple machines to protect against suspicion, better tailoring the reviews so as to make said items sound more legitimate, and even “outwitting Facebook (News - Alert)” in some measures.

Reviews are an easy thing to fake, and a tough thing to recognize as fake. After all, there are varying levels of skill in everything, so too with writing; for every master of prose who can make you taste the truffle reduction sauce at a restaurant, there are ten people who can barely talk about the chicken fingers without exclamation points. Telling who's actually tried a place or a service is tough going, but finding the fake reviews will improve everyone's experience online. Thus, it becomes good practice to put only limited faith in reviews, regardless of the number, and focus on personal experience to carry the day.