I do video work professionally and came across something that not everyone may be aware of. I see a lot of new people asking about real estate guru programs and so forth - often, the gurus and people who jump in to back them up cite client testimonials as proof of their program's success.

Professional video costs money, but there are many places to get cheap (and low quality) video work. One of the cheap places is Fiverr, their pitch being that most services start at $5. Was on the site recently and found something interesting - they have an entire category dedicated to testimonials. Naturally this is not *supposed* to be full of people offering fake reviews, but of course it is. I saw a number of American sellers doing fake testimonials for anything from real estate, make money online, accident attorneys ("I was in a car wreck"), etc.

Fake testimonials are nothing new, but I wanted to point out that I could get TEN decent to high quality testimonials for my new "course" just by writing out the scripts and paying $50. How do the sellers make money? They can charge $5 because they get say 20 orders over the course of a week and then do them all at once, hence $100 for maybe an hour or so of work (they also try to upsell for various features etc.) If someone was willing to spend a bit more money, of course you could get even better testimonials/reviews.

Many of us probably disregard unverified testimonials anyways, but I personally had not realized how cheaply they could be obtained (from Americans) until I happened to see and figured I'd share. There are other sites that offer these services at similar prices. Be careful :)

edit: Forgot to add - often these reviews are justified as "someone left me that review on my site and I just wanted to have it converted into video form" ;)