•Comprehensive examination of various methodologies in the identification of false reviews.•A novel and practical approach that leverages transformer architecture to identify fake reviews.•A comprehensive assessment conducted on benchmark datasets with highly favourable outcomes. Internet reviews significantly influence consumer purchase decisions across all types of goods and services. However, fake reviews can mislead both customers and businesses. Many machine learning (ML) techniques have been proposed to detect fake reviews, but they often suffer from poor accuracy due to their focus on linguistic features rather than semantic content. This paper presents a novel semantic- and linguistic-aware model for fake review detection that improves accuracy by leveraging advanced transformer architecture. Our model integrates RoBERTa with an LSTM layer, enabling it to capture intricate patterns within fake reviews. Unlike previous methods, our approach enhances the robustness of fake review detection and authentic behavior profiling. Experimental results on semi-real benchmark datasets show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 96.03 % accuracy on the OpSpam dataset and 93.15 % on the Deception dataset. To further enhance transparency and credibility, we utilize Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) and attention techniques to clarify our model's classifications. The empirical findings indicate that our proposed model can offer rational explanations for classifying specific reviews as fake.