Brooklyn Yogurt Shop Sting Snares Fake Reviewers For NY Attorney General 168
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reuters reports that nineteen companies caught writing fake reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google Local and CitySearch have been snared in a year-long sting operation by the New York Attorney General and will pay $350,000 in penalties. The Attorney General's office set up a fake yogurt shop in Brooklyn, New York, and sought help from firms that specialize in boosting online search results to combat negative reviews. Search optimization companies offered to post fake reviews of the yogurt shop, created online profiles, and paid as little as $1 per review to freelance writers in the Philippines, Bangladesh and Eastern Europe. To avoid detection the companies used 'advanced IP spoofing techniques' to hide their true identities. 'This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit across the Internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution,' said Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. 'More than 100 million visitors come to Yelp each month, making it critical that Yelp protect the integrity of its content,' said Aaron Schur, Yelp's Senior Litigation Counsel."
..as little? (Score:5, Interesting)
that's huge money for such little work. especially in countries like bangladesh.
Re:..as little? (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on your perspective. If your perspective is a Bangladesh worker, it's huge. If your cost perspective is an American spender, it's tiny. This article is written for first-world readers, so $1 is tiny.
Re:..as little? (Score:5, Interesting)
Again, the perspective of $1 being tiny is from the American *spender*, which would be a business. Most businesses would likely consider it a marketing expense, so they could get 300 reviews for the same cost as printing brochures and it will likely have a much bigger impact than brochures.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Change review (Score:2)
So with that in mind, how about they change their reviews to:
I was paid to write good review by [sleazy marketing co], but they are evil and never sent me any money.
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So with that in mind, how about they change their reviews to:
I was paid to write good review by [sleazy marketing co], but they are evil and never sent me any money.
Then [sleazy marketing co]'s other stooges report the review as being against guidelines, and it is removed. Better to just flip the meaning. Change a good review to a bad one, or vice versa. Make it sound believable. Of course, that's just more work, and for no money...
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Outside of the US, bilingualism is pretty common in many countries. Not sure if Bangladesh would number among them, but it's pretty likely that a sizable enough portion of the population would be able to get by well enough for online reviews with Google translate able to fill in the blanks for them.
Re:..as little? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but the review can't be in typical bilingual "English": "The yogurts are very nice in these establishment. I hunger for yogurts from such good flavours."
The reviews would read like a Nigerian email scam.
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You mean a millennial? Yeah, they can't spell.
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Gartner is supposed to be into market research.
In reality they're nothing more than shills and bad "futurists" that Managers believe.
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If I had mod points AC, I would mod you up.
You are full of win.
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Dark Helmet's review (Score:5, Funny)
"Yogurt! Yogurt! I hate Yogurt! Even with strawberries."
Re:Dark Helmet's review (Score:5, Funny)
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Lahsi? I think you're mangoing my intent here.
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Mongo? Santa Maria!
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Mongo like candy!
Re:Dark Helmet's review (Score:5, Funny)
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My idea of culture hangs on the wall at a museum, not growing in a cup on my table.
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For some reason the wording of your comment just reminded me I brought a yogurt to work and then left it in the cup holder of my car. Thank you.
Can't trust Internet comments?! (Score:5, Funny)
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wouldn't that be yelps problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
it seems to me, if yelp is interested in preserving it's value to customers, part of that would be preventing fake reviews. why would we get our legal system involved? not to mention - when did it become illegal to lie on the internet...or conversly - when did the internet become even close to being legitimate enough that you need the legal system to protect it's truthfulness?
Re:wouldn't that be yelps problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably around the time billions of sales dollars a year are highly influenced by online reviews, articles, etc. It's always been illegal to lie online if the lying falls under libel or slander laws, as well as fraud, false advertising, etc.
Re:wouldn't that be yelps problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, oddly enough, paying yelp to remove negative reviews doesn't seem to fall under those headers.
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It's a myth. Negative yelp reviews will often stay there, no matter the company. 5 years ago or so these accusations were being made, it seems some Yelp salesmen were making unwarranted claims that advertising would make their negative reviews go away. So Yelp made their filtered reviews publicly available.
Sorry to stand up for the big guys and obviously there is some fraud going on, but "pay yelp to get rid of negative reviews" isn't one of them.
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Wait, IANAL but. Under Slander and Libel you have to show harm. False advertising is prosmising something you don't deliver on. Opinions that "these are the best waffles in the world" and "my salesman was the nicest and most helpful person ever" have never been an issue because they are opinion. Heck resturants advertise the best waffles in the world all the time, and since it can't be objectively proven...
So again what is the exact crime, breaking Yelp's TOS?
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IANAL, which is why I included the "etc" because I don't know all the legal ins and outs of those various laws. I would imagine it would fall under something like misleading the consumer because you're purporting to be another customer giving the review, not the company advertising its own product.
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I'll pay you back. Where would you like me to send my 1.5 cents?
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Reuters reports that nineteen companies caught writing fake reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google Local and CitySearch have been snared in a year-long sting operation by the New York Attorney General and will pay $350,000 in penalties
I don't know how much it cost in man-hours, but 19 * 350 000$ (6 650 000$) is a lot of money. I wouldn't be surprised if they recouped their investment and more...
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Given how broadly the computer-crime laws are written, they're lucky they didn't get thrown in jail for that "advanced IP spoofing"...
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Seems like pretty straightforward fraud to me, and in addition it probably violates many consumer protection statutes. Besides, it's the NY Attorney General, not the federal government. People in NY like this kind of action from the Attorney General... it's what gets them elected.
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not to mention - when did it become illegal to lie on the internet...
It's called wire fraud, and it was illegal long before the Internet. Basically, it makes it a federal crime to use interstate electronic communications to knowingly spread false information for commercial gain.
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So.... if they're investigating large-scale, intentional deceit. . .
. . . .shouldn't they be investigating Albany and Washington DC ???
Re:false expectations/incorrect data (Score:2)
Anyone can post anything on the internet, it might not even be true. Whilst perusing the summary, I was misled into thinking that TFA was linked at reuters [reuters.com]. But it turns out that I just burned up another instance of the NYT from my monthly allotment. I never get used to it. silly me.
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Not my box, but iirc its the same at home, I go to incognito and burn through ten pages, since I haven't bothered to worked out cookie management in the new browser.
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I take most reviews with a grain or more of salt after Consumer Reports tried to show that the Suziki Samuri 4x4 was unsafe.
Anyone remember those units they mounted to prevent the vehicle from rolling over followed by the manuevers to cause it to roll up onto them? Those levers were over eight feet long and weighed a 100 pounds/45Kg each (200#/90Kg a side). Tell me that thing wont roll at 20 mph with the center of gravity raised that much. Hell put em on a comparable Jeep CJ 5/7 of the time (80's) and see what in hell happens. That's when Consumer Reports lost my trust. Now if they'd done it as an educational effort and compared several models of 4x4, I'd still be willing to trust them somewhat but they shot themselves in the foot with the full out biased against a Japanese company that had been producing a 4x4 for the same length of time as the Jeep.
Fast Turtle - Posting AC due to mods
I think you're misremembering the lawsuit. Suzuki's biggest complaint wasn't with the rollover protection outriggers, but their claim was that CU porposely tried to make the Samarai roll over by putting it through multiple runs and using multiple drivers until they found one that could make it roll over.
CU, of course, denied that this was the case.
Suzuki sued them for $60M, but in the end, they ended up settling out of court (after Suzuki lost several court challenges) with no exchange of money, and CU prom
Where's the Yogurt? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the former, one might imagine a hapless Brooklynite trying to find this awesome place they read about on Yelp and being sorely disappointed when the address ended up being, what? A PO box? And then wouldn't they then go onto Yelp and report the address as wrong?
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This Yogurt Shop only appears to those who are worthy of its awesome flavors.
Used advanced IP spoofing? Where's Carmen Ortiz? (Score:5, Informative)
Where are the feds with this one? IP spoofing was one of the charges the feds used to intimidate Aaron Swartz.
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when they banned his IP and MAC address, Aaron Swartz simply changed them both. That's not acting in good faith
You mean kind of like knowing writing fake reviews on Yelp is against their end user agreement so using ip spoofing to avoid detection? Sounds like it's almost the identical thing to me.
Seinfeld Episode (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds suspiciously like a Seinfeld episode.
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This sounds suspiciously like a Seinfeld episode.
It's fat free!
Been Going On For A Long Time (Score:4, Informative)
This kind of thing has been going on for as long as there have been online comments about products. One of the first sites I ran was an infomercial product review site. I got some great reviews saying how good or awful products were (tip: don't buy Epil-Stop). I would also get a sudden flood of positive reviews on a product. At that time, the fake reviewers weren't too sophisticated so you could tell that the 100 positive reviews from 100 "different people" were coming from the same IP address. I'd junk them but even at the time it was a lot of effort for what was a one man operation. I can sympathize with the comments moderation teams at Yelp, Amazon, and any other place that accepts user comments on products but tries to weed out fake ones.
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The fact that you cared about the quality of the reviews on your site makes you different, and sadly outdated in today's internet climate.
Yelp is almost certainly in on the scam and making money on it. (It is the only way to explain why their site is the way it is.)
Amazon just doesn't give a shit. (Though this leads to hilarious reviews.)
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I can sympathize with the comments moderation teams at Yelp, Amazon
They must be getting better at automating this - my reviews at Amazon are usually (but not always) getting posted in about 5 minutes these days, vs. days to hours in the past. My guess is they have an automated grading system with a worker who merely sanity checks the results.
I'm puzzled... (Score:2)
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By producing fake reviews, these companies violated multiple state laws against false advertising and engaged in illegal and deceptive business practices.
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http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/nycode/GBS/22-A [findlaw.com]
Simple fix, although it makes me cringe a little. (Score:2)
.
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That will work well for a lot of personal care products.
"Here's me with my hemorrhoid cream. Notice how easy it is to apply."
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Hmmm (Score:2)
There's more than one kind of fake review.
One is just straight up lying, they got paid to post but never actually used the service/product.
The other is the way Apple does it, where just before the release of a new product "independent" tech blogs, and various other bottom feeding scum bubble up to praise their fruity overlords and go full gush on something they have never used (generate false excitement).
Then there are the reviews that while true, they don't allow or they remove bad reviews.
You're better of
This will not stop (Score:2)
... until all the fake reviewers are in prison for 10 years, and the executives of the businesses doing this in prison for 30 years.
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... until all the fake reviewers are in prison for 10 years, and the executives of the businesses doing this in prison for 30 years.
'Cause seeking vengeance with rape cages is so much better than implementing a reputation system that review sites could use to delegitimize fake reviewers.
Like investigating Google (Score:2)
The investigation sounds a lot like the one Wired wrote up about Google helping people get illegal drug sites high up in the PageRank.
They had recordings from helpdesk people on how to get around it.
Several recordings for (supposedly) different companies to help skirt the rules Google supposedly had in place.
I don't know why people believe stuff they read on the internet. Probably for the same reason they believe
companies used 'advanced IP spoofing techniques' " (Score:2)
Starting a Tor client and using random exit nodes is "advanced"?
no sh*t, sherlock (Score:2)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing [wikipedia.org]
I've got no faith in Yelp at all anyhow (Score:2)
A year or two back I posted a review of a food truck that was positive about the product, but negative about some of the business practices of the truck. The vendor complained to Yelp, and they pulled the review because it wasn't just about the product itself. Business practices matter as well, at least they should. And the ease that the vendor had in getting a negative review turfed tells me that nothing on Yelp is to be trusted at all.
Re:What's a Yelp? (Score:5, Funny)
I've never used your services. Are you somehow relevant somewhere?
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Still, excellent witty retort there. Be sure to high-five your buddies on your way back in from recess.
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Did she yelp?
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More relevant than Slashdot is about anything.
I wouldn't go quite that far. MS pay astroturfers to post on Slashdot too, so it must be relevant to something. I haven't noticed any for a while, mind you.. but then again, I haven't been reading the comments as often recently.
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There are the unpaid fans of just about anything. I think this is psychological, people want to belong to something and then promote it and denigrate the competition. Even with restaurants, or the tiniest of outlets like a frozen yogurt stand.
Ie, they find a fro-yo they like and then they write a great review, much nicer review than what they actually got (this place has mango and the old place didn't therefore this place is the BEST). They then see others write great reviews and it gives them a warm fee
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More importantly, how much did the NY AG's office spend to do all this, to collect $350K in fines ??
Somehow, I suspect it was a lot more than $350K. . . .
Re:cost of doing business (Score:4, Insightful)
The government isn't in the business of being a business, so profit isn't the intention. The value to them isn't the fines as much as it to get people to follow the rules and fining them is one of the ways to do that. So if the AG spent $500,000, but it cuts down false reviews by 20%, they might consider it money well spent.
Now, if they spent $500,000 in a tax collection effort (something to bring in more money) that only yielded $350,000, then it would be a failure, but that's not what this was.
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Re:cost of doing business (Score:5, Informative)
>And what rules were broken
http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/nycode/GBS/22-A/350-a [findlaw.com]
Don't be a dumbass, there has been false advertising laws for years to deal with issues like this in meatspace. Lying out of your ass about products your are selling has nothing to do with free speech.
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But here, it is someone else lying about the products of a company, not the company directly themselves.
Reviews are not ads....
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Lying out of your ass about products your are selling has nothing to do with free speech.
Well, the speech should be free, but the fraud should be punished (through the market IMO, though others prefer flogging).
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Certainly you can lie about your products. Everyone selling a product does this. "Best Pizza in Town" would be a crime otherwise.
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I find google reviews to be the most useful. You can even check the person's G+ to see how legit they appear to be.
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Why do you need a site for this? If it's a nice restaurant then the local papers should have a review for it. If there is no review then take a chance and just try it out anyway! If it's not a nice restaurant then who cares what the reviews are? Why not just pick a place at random? Will the world end if the service is not the best? I am honestly baffled what people are expecting to find from these sites. Society operated for millenia without Yelp and now suddenly people are unable to find a place to
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What I find interesting is that while I think it's absolutely obvious that Yelp is useless, I see so many people who swear by it and use Yelp all the time. They either refuse to believe that the reviews are biased or faked or gamed, or that this only happens to places they don't plan to visit and never their local smoothie shops.
Even without the gaming of the system it should be apparent to all that self selected surveys are inaccurate. No one ever takes the time to write a review that says "it was okay I
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I shouldn't have to do this for you since you were replying to AC....
Try this link: www.yelp.com
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Re:Texting and navigation (Score:4, Funny)
Do you sometimes wish you'd replied in the right thread?
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Maybe he was talking about eating and reviewing yogurts while driving.
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Everything is online now days. So why not have crime online, too? Oh wait, it is.
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It's also a negative review on doing business in New York. People are just trying to make some money in the bad economy. Now they have to move over to New Jersey.
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I write 'fake' reviews and it is now a crime? I'd never heard of this before. Am I now to have to prove that I bought and used a product or was a client of a shop....for any review I do?
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But still, a "review" is not an AD. It is an opinion, and I don't know that there are or should be laws regulating an opinion a person posts on on the web or anywhere else, whether paid for or not.
That gets (to me) dangerously close to regulating speech that should not be regulated.
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On top of that, the individuals may not have broken any law, while the company did.
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I still don't see a "crime" in writing a fake or bad review about a place that doesn't exist. Nor, for that matter, one that does that I haven't been to. This isn't the Attorney General's problem, this is Yelp's problem, and if Yelp wants to engage in shady tactics, it's just more reason to not trust them for much beyond names, addresses, and phone numbers of businesses.
Yelp sucks. That's not a crime.
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From the original government media release, "By producing fake reviews, these companies violated multiple state laws against false advertising and engaged in illegal and deceptive business practices."
http://www.ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-announces-agreement-19-companies-stop-writing-fake-online-reviews-and [ny.gov]
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This seems like a stretch to me, legally, and an arbitrary abuse of power. But, I am not a lawyer or related entity.
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Let's say you own a yoghurt shop. You are honest about your product. You rely on paid advertising ("Person X liked our yoghurt so much, he agreed to be in this ad for it!") and word of mouth advertising (your customers telling people how good your yoghurt is).
Another yoghurt shop opens. Its owner is not honest. Like you, they rely on paid advertising, except their Person Y who claims to like their yoghurt has never eaten a single mouthful of it, and word of mouth advertising, except the "customers" are actu
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The key point here is that there was no yogurt shop. People were writing fake reviews for a fake business.
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You read the summary???
"You READ something on /. ?"
FTFY
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There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again.