https://steamproxy.net/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/4222762959836264571

Sentinels of the Store and their allies embarked on a clandestine operation to infiltrate a fake Russian review consortium, revealing information about how much reviewers are paid for fake reviews, the terms and conditions of their employment, the revelations are eye opening and their announcement is worth reading.

Largely this confirms much of what we already knew or suspected.

Asset flippers and review manipulators mostly go hand-in-hand.

Fake reviewers seed their review history with "genuine" red herring reviews that are unpaid to throw people off the scent... so unless a game has multiple fake reviews, it may just be misfortune for the developer to get a free fake review.

Fake reviewers must buy the game up front, write the review, then they get re-imbursed for the game purchase price + roughly 50c worth of roubles for their hard work. Which may not seem like much but there's very little effort involved and some of these reviewers have written thousands of fake reviews.

Kudos to Sentinels of the Store and hopefully this will cause Valve to wake up and take notice of what's been happening right under their noses... perhaps finally the reports of review manipulation might get actioned after all.