Wide-Ranging Review Manipulation Attacks: Model, Empirical Study, and Countermeasures

User reviews have become a cornerstone of how we make decisions. However, this user-based feedback is susceptible to manipulation as recent research has shown the feasibility of automatically generating fake reviews. Previous investigations, however, have focused on generative fake review approaches that are (i) domain dependent and not extendable to other domains without replicating the whole process from scratch; and (ii) character-level based known to generate reviews of poor quality that are easily detectable by anti-spam detectors and by end users. In this work, we propose and evaluate a new class of attacks on online review platforms based on neural language models at word-level granularity in an inductive transfer-learning framework wherein a universal model is refined to handle domain shift, leading to potentially wide-ranging attacks on review systems. Through extensive evaluation, we show that such model-generated reviews can bypass powerful anti-spam detectors and fool end users. Paired with this troubling attack vector, we propose a new defense mechanism that exploits the distributed representation of these reviews to detect model-generated reviews. We conclude that despite the success of neural models in generating realistic reviews, our proposed RNN-based discriminator can combat this type of attack effectively (90% accuracy).