How To Actually Judge A Website

[Dmitry-Afremov]

Can You Really Trust Online Reviews? My Honest Take from Selling Over 4 Million Paintings


Hello everyone,My name is Dmitry Afremov. Many of you know me as the son of artist Leonid Afremov, a father of three daughters, and the marketing director of Afremov.com. Over the course of my life, I have sold more than four million paintings. That number represents millions of customers, orders, conversations, thank-you messages, complaints, and, of course, reviews.

Today, I want to talk openly about online reviews. Can we actually trust them anymore? How do you tell whether a company is legitimate or a scam? Which reviews are real, and which are simply weapons used by competitors? After more than 20 years in e-commerce, I’ve seen it all—the good, the bad, and the absurd. Here is my personal, no-jargon perspective on how things really work.

Perfect Reviews Don’t Exist

At first glance, checking reviews seems straightforward. You visit a review platform, see a company rated 4.0 or 4.5 stars, and start reading individual comments. One customer says everything was amazing. Another says the service was terrible and they will never buy again.Here is the first important truth: A real business with thousands of orders and 100% perfect reviews does not exist. If you see a large company with a near-perfect 4.99 rating and almost no negative feedback, someone is likely working very hard behind the scenes to maintain that image. But the deeper problem is that reviews, on their own, rarely give an accurate picture of a company.After two decades on the internet, no one has created a truly fair system for verifying reviews. Even I don’t know how to build one perfectly.

afremov.com of various review websites

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The Dangerous Asymmetry: Negative Reviews Are Easy, Positive Ones Are Hard

Leaving a negative review today requires almost no effort. Anyone can go to a review site and write “Scammers. Fraudsters. Terrible experience.” The company’s best response is usually something like “We don’t even recognize this customer,” which often comes across as defensive.Removing false negative reviews is extremely difficult. It involves endless appeals and moderation disputes, and the review frequently stays online anyway. On many platforms, simply visiting a website, opening the chat, and exchanging a couple of messages can qualify someone to leave a review.Positive reviews face the opposite problem. Legitimate companies encourage satisfied customers to share their experiences. Yet review platforms often demand proof of purchase, selfies with the product, ID verification, or other hurdles. Most busy people with jobs and families simply close the page instead of jumping through these hoops.The result is a fundamentally unfair system:Negative reviews are easy to post and hard to remove.
Positive reviews are difficult to post and heavily moderated.

This imbalance gives competitors and trolls powerful tools to damage reputations with little consequence.

Examples of afremov.com reviews that were we cannot verify if the order was really made and we flagged and appealed many times but the review is still online

in this situation the customer probably ordered a fake afremov painting on Aliexpres. Aliexpress is one of the sites where all kinds of cheaply made knockoff circulate. Trustpilot does not allow to upload the picture of the product, so this give this review even less trust. you can see the review and our response

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in this review, the customer just says its a scam without providing any order details or specifics. This review was also no verified. the customer refuses to provide order information. This review cannot be trusted because it does not provide any details about the transaction or interaction at all. Usually such reviews appear from angry competition.

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This review could be a real transaction but the customer also refused to provide their order information. in this case the customer probably did not read the description and assumed that a studio hand made copy for $139 is a masterpiece original that normally sells for $25,000

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in this review the persons probably did order from afremov.com but did not read any information pages or description and use the words "pre-suppose"
which means that he/she did not read any information pages, any descriptions. Thus the customer only purchased based on emotion. This is not a smart way to purchase online. Your assumptions are yours only and do not constitute any scam on the part of the seller. You need to read all the information required to see exactly what are you buying. I would say that this person emotionally scammed himself by not reading important information on the site

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Here you can see the email that trustpilot sent to one of our customers that did try to leave a genuine 5 starts review

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Here is the response and evidence that he had to provide

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most of the customers will not go through the hassle to send information to confirm their review. So many positive reviews simply get rejected.



We Experienced It Ourselves


We went through waves of coordinated negative reviews at Afremov.com. At first, you question everything your team is doing wrong. Then patterns emerge—identical complaints appearing in clusters. It creates a snowball effect that causes real stress. The scary part is that this can happen to almost any honest business because the system allows almost anyone to say almost anything.

Here is an example of targeted campaign on the site complaints board. Where people can comment anything they want on the complaint

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here is the link to the whole thread https://www.complaintsboard.com/afremovcom-scam-c209226

The whole thing was over a series of phone calls by a stalker who never ordered a single painting. He just wanted to smear us online because Leonid Afremov did not want to speak with him. Leonid Afremov moved to Mexico in 2010 because stalkers would not leave him alone. The police was at his house or studio every other day. Leonid Afremov has signed several restraining orders.


How Review Platforms Make Money

What the review sites are doing can come off as borderline digital extortion. Review platforms earn revenue by selling “reputation management tools.” They do not openly demand payment to remove bad reviews, but they offer faster moderation, priority dispute handling, review widgets, and better visibility—for a fee that can reach tens of thousands of dollars. Large corporations can ignore low ratings because of their scale, but small and medium businesses can be destroyed by this system.

Here is an example of the fees trustpliot charges for different packages

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Here are some examples of review scores on trustpilot of big multinational companies. they have thousands of bad reviews.

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Here are example of review scores small websites and afremov.com

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We have sold over 4 million paintings and prints since 2003. but we only have 263 reviews on trustpilot. Why is that? its because we do not chase the customers to leave reviews because we refuse to pay 800 USD per month for their management tool. Without the paid review management. they do not allow mass positive reviews. they scrutinize every single positive review unless you have a paid plan.




The Story of My Artist Friend

A friend of mine ran a small honest business selling art prints from home. A competitor, along with friends using multiple accounts, flooded review sites and forums with fake negative reviews. My friend had sold fewer prints than the number of negative reviews he received. Despite our efforts to explain the fraud to the platforms, nothing changed. The stress became too much, and his business eventually collapsed. I know dozens of similar stories. The friend had his site unlisted and with the site unlisted he could remove all the reviews because the site not longer exists.

What Buyers Should Actually Do

So how should you, as a buyer, evaluate whether a company is trustworthy? Use simple logic instead of relying solely on reviews:

Check the age of the business. If the domain has been active for 10, 15, or 20 years, the chance it is a scam is very low. Fraudulent operations rarely survive that long.

Here is the example of afremov.com on https://who.is/whois/afremov.com The site exists from 2006 for 20 years already.

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Look at payment methods. This is critical. Review sites do not protect you—payment processors do. Avoid “crypto only” sites with brand-new domains. Prefer companies that accept PayPal, credit cards, Stripe, and other major processors that offer buyer protection and chargebacks.

Here is how afremov.com payment options look like. We accept all cards via stripe, paypal, google pay and apple pay.

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Contact the company directly. Reach out via WhatsApp, email, phone, or live chat. Real businesses do not hide from customers.

Years ago, platforms like eBay had a more logical system: feedback could only be left after an actual transaction. Today, anyone can post almost anything under the protection of “It’s just my opinion.”

Let’s Try Real Honesty

That is why I want to do something different here. If you have bought one of our paintings and you are reading this, please share your real experience. Take a photo of the painting in your home and post it. Tell us honestly what you think—good or bad. This blog will remain unmoderated. We will not delete uncomfortable comments. The internet desperately needs more spaces for genuine, uncensored conversation.I would love to hear from you. Share your experiences buying art online—positive, negative, or surprising. Only through open and honest discussion can we cut through the noise of modern reviews.T

thank you for reading. I look forward to your thoughts.








Links to our social media profiles


https://www.facebook.com/leonidafremovofficialpage/
https://x.com/afremovartcom
https://www.instagram.com/afremov?utm_s ... c0MzIxNw==
https://www.youtube.com/@afremovgallery
https://www.tiktok.com/@afremovartstudi ... _device=pc

[RustyTrail77]

Good point. I don’t think reviews should be ignored, but I also don’t think they should be the only thing people trust. Sometimes it’s better to look at the full picture — how long the company has existed, whether they accept safe payment methods, how clearly they describe the product, and whether real customers are willing to share photos. Reviews matter, but context matters too

[SundayDriver]

This was a really interesting read. I've always felt that online reviews only tell part of the story, and your explanation of how easy it is to leave negative feedback compared to positive feedback makes a lot of sense. At the end of the day, a company that has been around for decades and processed millions of orders says a lot more to me than a handful of anonymous reviews.

[CoffeeAndRoads]

The post raises some valid points about how online review systems can be inconsistent and sometimes influenced by platform rules or user behavior, especially when it comes to the imbalance between negative and positive feedback. At the same time, it strongly frames all criticism as unreliable or external manipulation, which makes the overall argument feel somewhat one-sided rather than fully balanced. I’m a young artist—could I sell my paintings through your platform as well?

[SmallTownEric]

Afremov is the best, the most grateful reviews to you

[AmberFields]

It feels like your argument oversimplifies a very complex issue and leans heavily on your personal experience rather than a balanced view of the industry. You seem more focused on defending your own position than actually examining how reviews work across different platforms and users. Because of that, your conclusions about “trust” don’t feel fully objective or universally reliable.

[PineStreetJoe]

This is a really interesting and quite realistic breakdown of how online review systems actually work behind the scenes, especially the imbalance between how easily negative feedback spreads compared to verified positive experiences. The points about long-term business history, payment protection, and direct customer communication being more reliable than raw ratings actually make a lot of sense from a practical buyer perspective. It’s also refreshing to see an honest invitation for real customers to share uncensored experiences instead of relying only on curated review scores.