Are we completely helpless against fake reviews?

[Gurkiran]

I spent a lot of time tracking partners whose apps had an unusually fast increase in reviews. 

And I realized that we cannot stop fake reviews. Although Shopify has a new process for reviewing reviews before publishing them.
Let's say your company is a company specializing in web development services for the Shopify platform. Your company has many customer staff accounts, and your company is also an app development partner for Shopify. So what will happen????
You develop a store for customers, install your own application and leave good reviews for your application. Does the store owner know? As far as I know, if you use the staff account to leave a review, there will be no email notification to the store owner. But if the store owner knows about you writing a review for an app using his store, he probably doesn't care because he doesn't have to directly install that app. So your app has a valid review by praising yourself. Perfect, right?

I think Shopify knows what I'm talking about but they don't have any reasonable plan to prevent it.

So in the end we still have to be helpless with fake reviews.

[Don]

Hi there, @Gurkiran!

Thanks for reaching out here in the Shopify Community to share your concern.

If you wish to file a report on a Partner you believe to be in violation of our Partner Program Agreement you can do so using this form here.

If you would prefer to reach out to our Partner support team directly instead, you can do so here.

All the best! 

[Gurkiran]

It is very difficult to have evidence in this case. But I have encountered many applications that after receiving a 1-star review, there will immediately be a few 5-star reviews to push the bad reviews to the next page. And then after that, the review growth rate of that application slowed down. I believe this is not just a coincidence. Because it repeats over and over again. That's the trick.
I recommend that you carefully moderate reviews left by staff accounts. This is a huge loophole for partners to write their own reviews for their own apps.

[Don]

Hi again, @Gurkiran!

Apologies for my delay in getting back to you here as I have been away from work for some time.

I would still encourage you to reach out to the Partner team using the links shared above with any of the examples you mentioned here so they can check it out with you.

In any case thank you for taking the time to let us know about this!