How Celestolite Uses Fake Google Reviews and Scams You

Who uses fake reviews? Someone who needs to cover something up. How do you identify fake reviews, I'm about to show you.

Celestolite is a Salon in London, which uses fake reviews. It's owned by the same group of schemers which got myself and many others into debt by selling us treatment packages and then not delivering them.

I covered the basics of the scandal and scam here but now I'm going to dive a bit deeper.

We all know how important reviews are. As consumers we rely on what our peers think about an experience, product, or service to determine whether or not we should purchase or have that service. Generally when we see a product or service with a lot of favorable reviews we tend to trust it. In other words reviews = trust.

Celestolite, and it's former version Smooth You relies on reviews as part of their entire approach. They know going into this scam that they can't avoid negative reviews. After-all, their entire business requires them to be pushy, aggressive, and ruthless, and not every woman has no backbone to stand up to them. From time to time they will encounter someone who will put up a fight. While they do their best to remove reviews as quickly as possible, they will not always succeed.

This poses a tremendous problem. The key to this scam is hiding that it's actually a scam. If multiple negative reviews pop up calling them out on it, they have to shut-down and rebrand which isn't cheap. So what solution do they have?

Well they drown the negative reviews with fake positive reviews.

Let's have a look.

Celestolite currently has 2 locations in London at the time of writing this:

1) 61 King's Rd, Chelsea, London SW3 4NT, UK

2) 155 Kensington High St, Kensington, London W8 6SU, UK

The first one is the older one, it's been around for about a year and half. The second one is only open since about September 2018.

We know this because they were using the name Elevatione prior to September.

In Fact I was there in July and it was using the name Elevatione.

In a weird twist of fate, somehow the one open for just 4 months already has 154 reviews, while the location open for over a year and half only has 200 reviews. That seems to not add up.

So it got me into thinking "lets have a look at the reviews."

Have a look at Victoria Perez, a google user who left a review a week ago. Victoria has left only two reviews on google businesses in her entire life.

Ok, that's not weird, most of us don't review businesses, so that's reasonable.

So I figured, I'd click and see what her other review was.

Hmmm...

Guess what I found.

Funny, victoria left the same exact review for both Celestolite locations, at the same time.

Surely this must be a mistake. Let's have a look at some other reviews.

What I found was massive amounts of duplicate reviews all published at the exact same time on both locations together, with zero other review history.

The only reviews I found that had any remote resemblance to normal user behavior were all the negative reviews.


But have a look at some more of these ridiculous reviews.

Bottom line, it's pretty clear that Celestolite is using fake reviewer profiles to cover up their negative reviews. They are so lazy about it that they don't even make it look real, and they often just copy paste the same exact review at the same time for both locations, without putting any effort into ensuring that it appears real.

Until next time, remember, you have been warned, not just by me, but by Catia, their ex employee who shared her wisdom with us all!