UK Businesses Caught Buying Five-Star Google Reviews (bbc.com) 50
Google is failing to do enough to combat fake reviews within its business listings, and must be held to account by a UK watchdog, according to Which? The BBC reports: Which? conducted its research by essentially setting up a "sting" operation to catch unscrupulous operators in the act. It created a fake business listing which it called "five-star reviews," and searched online for companies advertising paid-for Google reviews. It then spent $150 on their services. Which? told each company it wanted five-star reviews only, and between three and five of them a day -- and the consumer group's researchers wrote the reviews themselves, "praising how good the made-up business and its fake owner Catherine are." The fake reviews appeared over the following week, a few at a time.
But in investigating the "reviewers" behind them, the Which? team found, among others:
- 15 reviewers who had rated both an Edinburgh search engine optimization business and a London psychic as five stars, which it called "an unlikely coincidence"
- A stockbroker in Canary Wharf who, having had several bad reviews in mid-2020, received 30 five-star ones "in quick succession" a few months later
- A reviewer who claimed to have lived in Surrey for years while praising a local car company, and a Glasgow electric gate firm 412 miles (663 km) away for work on his home
- The same reviewer also praised a dentist in Manchester, a paving firm in Bournemouth, and a Cambridgeshire locksmith, who allegedly saved his toddler from a locked car
Which? said it linked some 45 businesses scattered across the country to three suspicious "reviewers." That suggested they had each paid the same review seller to post their reviews, it said. It called on regulators and Google to take action. When it presented Google with the findings, the fake sting company was immediately deleted, Which? said.
But in investigating the "reviewers" behind them, the Which? team found, among others:
- 15 reviewers who had rated both an Edinburgh search engine optimization business and a London psychic as five stars, which it called "an unlikely coincidence"
- A stockbroker in Canary Wharf who, having had several bad reviews in mid-2020, received 30 five-star ones "in quick succession" a few months later
- A reviewer who claimed to have lived in Surrey for years while praising a local car company, and a Glasgow electric gate firm 412 miles (663 km) away for work on his home
- The same reviewer also praised a dentist in Manchester, a paving firm in Bournemouth, and a Cambridgeshire locksmith, who allegedly saved his toddler from a locked car
Which? said it linked some 45 businesses scattered across the country to three suspicious "reviewers." That suggested they had each paid the same review seller to post their reviews, it said. It called on regulators and Google to take action. When it presented Google with the findings, the fake sting company was immediately deleted, Which? said.
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You have quite the stalker there.
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Yes. All reviews are fake. We know. (Score:1)
We already established that.
Want a review you can trust? Find a person you trust.
If it is important, then (Score:2)
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regulators sort of help to fill the gap (e.g. health inspectors to hold restaurant owners criminally liable for poor food hygiene).
Doesn't that sort itself out though? Despite millions of taxpayer dollars spent on such schemes, people still get food poisoning. And word of mouth dishes out far more punishment than a letter from the food regulator ever would.
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Way fewer people get food poisoning now than used to (it was a huge problem; that's why we started inspecting restaurants). And word of mouth gets to a few dozen people; being shut down for a week gets to many thousands of people.
A general rule of thumb is that regulation is a major pain in the ass to create from scratch, so anywhere we have invasive regulation, it's because in the past, NOT having that regulation was far worse.
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it's because in the past, NOT having that regulation was far worse.
Seems to be a bit of a blanket statement. Segregation was a regulation, I'm pretty sure that didn't make anything better.
FWIW I do contracting for gov and the bureaucracy is batshit level insane. So sure, some regulations are productive, but I would bet money that if half of them disappeared overnight nothing would change. The downside of the regulation mindset is that it is self-fulfilling and propagating. Regulations breed more regulations and vast armies of self important bureaucrats to manage them all.
Re: If it is important, then (Score:2)
In my country there is barely any food poisoning anymore. If you this is still common where you live you must live in a developing country or a libertarian dystopia.
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In my country there is barely any food poisoning anymore.
So there is still food poisoning then? So when I said "People still get food poisoning" you actually agree but felt the need to somehow turn it into an argument?
If you this is still common where you live
Nowhere did I say it was "common".
you must live in a developing country or a libertarian dystopia.
Of course, it's the Libertarian dystopia. Nothing at all to do with your comprehension/social skills...
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The problem is that you can't know everything, so for the vast majority of products or services you are relying on externally sourced information, which can easily be incorrect either due to corruption or simply lack of knowledge on the part of the reviewer.
A good case in point that most slashdot readers should understand is internet service. Many providers advertise based on maximum achievable speed, and use results from various speedtest sites to back up their claims. But this is overall a ridiculous way
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Or read mostly the 1-3 star reviews, and a couple of 4-5s.
Filter out the 1-3 star reviews which you don't care about, and you should get a good picture of the company.
For example, for a hotel, if someone rates it 1* because of breakfast, I can ignore that because that's not the most important part of a hotel stay for me.
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I'm betting that there are some businesses that would pay to have their competition get a bunch of bad reviews.
There is no perfect solution (aside from ignoring the reviews). I don't trust too many review sites either outside of dcrainmaker and project farm.
Taotronics is buying too (Score:2)
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If they ask for a 5-star review, leave it, get your gift, then start extorting them for more things or else you'll amend the review to say they pay for reviews.
Shadowban (Score:2)
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just not display any suspected reviews to the public, only to ip's associated with the account that posted them, and leave them out of overall ratings completely.
Mobile IPs change so quickly that this has become ineffective. Any website that gets considerable traffic has probably seen the ip address of a user change from the time they started filling in the review form to the time that they submitted the review. It's weird, but the internet was built to support that kind of thing.
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Want good reviews, accept reality you have to pay for them. Ohh I don't mean fake good reviews, but quality reviews that actually review the product properly.
The best source, news services seeking to generate income, they can do news on products and put the reviews up on their website. The most popular reviews, not the reviews of good products made by good manufacturers, who must pay for the product to be reviewed but the other reviews which the pay for and are published on the news site. The reviews of sh
Not fake at all (Score:3, Insightful)
The trouble is that these aren't "fake" reviews at all. It's a person writing a review. The review is real.
It simply has absolutely zero predictive value.
Between hiring someone to write a review, or giving out free samples to have "customers" give good reviews, or giving out deep discounts to have customers give good reviews, or offering better service to customers who give better reviews..et cetera... it's all the same.
None of those reviews tell me what to expect from my potential customer dollars.
And since there is absolutely no way to distinguish a past-real-customer-of-the-same-shape-and-size-as-I-would-be-as-a-customer-in-the-same-context, reviews come down to the same one thing that any recommendation ever did:
How much do you trust the person giving the recommendation.
A stranger? Zero. Why would I?
Recommendations from strangers have zero merit. I don't know why anyone would have ever thought otherwise.
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Between hiring someone to write a review, or giving out free samples to have "customers" give good reviews, or giving out deep discounts to have customers give good reviews, or offering better service to customers who give better reviews..et cetera... it's all the same.
This is not about that. These reviews are reviews you can outsource to India or the Philippines. The reviewers have never been to the country and usually have never used the product.
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Like I said, there's no difference between someone who has, and someone who hasn't. Neither is of any predictive value.
The point is that there's no reason to keep any of them, and hence the solution is obvious.
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The trouble is that these aren't "fake" reviews at all. It's a person writing a review. The review is real.
Uh, you have that backwards. The person (might) be real (or a bot). The review is not. A "real" review would at least imply that the reviewer has actually used the product or service. This story is about the problem of buying and selling 100% fake reviews done by people who have no reason to provide a review other than to be paid for it.
It simply has absolutely zero predictive value.
Between hiring someone to write a review, or giving out free samples to have "customers" give good reviews, or giving out deep discounts to have customers give good reviews, or offering better service to customers who give better reviews..et cetera... it's all the same.
Giving out free samples is you hoping to get a good review from people who have actually used it. You also run the risk of people hating your product and you getting a
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Yeah. Can't imagine how Amazon is still in business...or why Consumer Reports still exists.
Actual reviews still hold great value, much like sex between humans does. The 21st Century Marketing Pimp just turned Reviews into a prostitution ring. Get the pimps and whores out of what was a legitimate business tactic. Then reviews can actually hold value again.
Even Consumer Reports are not that trustable. I've read reports where products get dinged for laughable reasons, and at least when I still paid attention to them, they have a huge hard-on against Jeeps.
But my main reason for replying is just how do we get legitimacy into internet reports? Humans show themselves to be remarkably corrupt, and even if not, have wildly differing ideas what good and bad are.
I like to use Rotten Tomatoes as the example of what Online rating is. They start out with an inte
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I think you've hit the nail on the head when you point out "different ideas of good and bad".
My mother likes to recommend movies to me, that she likes. Not movies that she thinks I'll like. Most people do that.
It's not something to be "fixed". That's what a review/recommendation actually is. It's someone else's opinion. There's simply no part of it that legitimizes it's applicability to anyone else.
This product is good because the company pays me. That product is bad because it's not my product. This
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It's single-issue voting.
Yup. Between that and the trolls, Online opinion is just about useless.
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In the UK you're supposed to disclose if you're getting something in return for "advertising". So if you mention your Slashdot 2000 Laptop on your youtube channel, you're supposed to say "they give me free stuff" or "they pay me" or whatever. There are some rules, but I suspect you'd be okay to put it in the comments below the video or whatever (ie. it can be pretty small compared to the size of the message).
Thus, it's not a huge reach to suggest saying "Slashdot is the greatest site on the Internet - I cou
Shouldn't it be (Score:2)
Google caught selling fake 5 star reviews (to UK businesses)
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Negative reviews are harder to generate automatically, or based on some template by a "local guide" or whatever a "paid troll" is called now.
Sorry, but I disagree. Complete Bullshit is not hard to write. Either positive or negative. "The wait staff was great/rude"..."We waited for only/damn near five minutes/an hour." One can be very generic when writing one-star reviews of generic services.
They also tend to be more reliable -- even if they're paid for by some competitor, or written by someone with an axe to grind, they sometimes include interesting details.
Uh, how the hell is a lie paid for by the competitor, "more reliable"?!? There is a difference between value and entertainment. Reviews have become Complete Bullshit now, which is about the only thing you can now rely on.
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That becomes libel and defamation which are crimes, lying about a product is false advertising which is hard to prove when it comes to reviews.
Slashdot mod points (Score:2)
Got a few mod points, just $1 each! SURELY this scourge hasn't reached our beloved Slashdot yet!
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Got a few mod points, just $1 each! SURELY this scourge hasn't reached our beloved Slashdot yet!
Mod points going for a mere dollar? Oh hell no.
Time to convert this to Slashcoins and lay the smack down on BTC with the three-fingered Gamestonk Grabber. BDE (Big Dork Energy) for days 'round here. Let's make this happen.
Looking at the patterns can be revealing (Score:1)
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Trump Tower: (Score:1)
"I just need to find 11,780 5-star reviews."
And here you get... (Score:2)
TornadoGuard [xkcd.com]
Star Rating [xkcd.com]
Trust, Expertise, Authority (Score:2)
Anyone with any common sense looking to find reputation for a website, product or business also researches each of the above from multiple resources. Anyone could have easily found the same information that Which? found. That information is transparent. Actually, it's non-news and happens frequently.
Reviews on Google's are actually one of the most transparent platforms. It takes 2 minutes to research the person who made the review, read other reviews they have written, notice the tone of the reviews..ect.
What about Celebrity endorsements? (Score:1)