Abstract-Public opinions and experience are valuable information in decision making process. Opinions may be sensitive since they may reflect one's perspective, understanding, particular feelings, way of life, and desires. Several websites encourage users to express and exchange their views, suggestions and opinions related to product, services, polices, etc. With the development of internet, people are more likely to express their views and opinions on eCommerce sites, forums and blogs and are able to interact intensively with the internet. Product reviews composed collaboratively by many independent internet reviewers can help consumers make purchase decisions and enable enterprises to improve their business strategies. As the number of reviews is increasing exponentially, opinion mining and retrieval techniques are needed to identify important reviews and opinions to answer users queries. Most opinion mining and retrieval approaches try to extract sentimental or bipolar expressions from a large volume of reviews. It is well-known that many online reviews are not written by genuine users of products, but by spammers who write fake reviews to promote or demote some target products. Therefore, this paper presents a review of literatures that discusses about essentials of spam and review spam and brief conceptualization of opinion review mining from data mining perspective. The study finally discusses the application areas, research challenges and research scope explored from the open issues in this area.