Slashdot Mirror
Shakedowns To Fix Negative Online Reviews
First time accepted submitter unjedai writes "A company is putting horrible reviews of small business online, and then offering to improve the company's reputation and take the reviews off for a fraction of the cost that a real reputation improvement company would charge. Sierra West received a call from a 'reputation improvement company' telling them they had a negative review online and that the company would take the review offline if Sierra West paid $500. 'Of course when someone is offering $500 the day (the bad review) goes up seemed not legitimate.'"
People and businesses value their online reputations, so these protection rackets were always going to come.
Seems like a fairly textbook case of libel.
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I'm pretty sure I heared about this sort of thing happening many years ago, at least as far back in early years of this centurary. No one should be surprised that it is happening: it is basically a traditional protection racket like scheme. When-ever there is something of value to "protect" they will spring up sooner or later.
In fact I'm sure I read (probably here) about a case where someone traced the protection demand to a person in the same state and ended up in court for taking the law into his own hands (finding the perp and beating him to within in inch of his life, having first failed to get local law enforcement to do anything because they didn't understand what the crime actually was).
If you use Trip Advisor you will find that most of the reviews are generic as they are written by professionals. Good reviews are paid for and while the hotel etc. is at it they pay for negative reviews to be written about all their competitors. This is not something new.
I know of one guest house here that had a bad report on trip advisor about staff stealing from the guests before the guest house had even received any guests. They had just opened and had not done any business at all and there first review was fake.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
That might explain all the negative comments we see about Microsoft.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
1. Register your business withe the Better Business Bureau, the Jaycees, Consumer Reports, and Dun & Bradstreet. Prominently link to your ratings. People will take the aforementioned organization's word before some troll's on a crappy "review" site.
2. Report all such solicitations to your local prosecutor as an extortion attempt.
3. Order the crap sites like White Pages, Yellow Pages, etc. to un-list your business and state why (they suck).
4. Have a cold beer and relax.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
When it comes to payment, a sure sign that it is a scam is when the business demands that you pay by wiring the money. If you wire money, it is not traceable or refundable, and it vanishes into the anonymous thief's pocket. So, always use credit cards or Pay-Pal, or something that offers protection. Only wire money if you absolutely, positively know the person to whom you are sending it.
Huh? Is that really how wire transfers are perceived in the United States?
In most of the civilized world, you can reverse a wire transfer if it turns out to be fraudulent (and if the fraudster hasn't withdrawn the money by then). And if he has the money withdrawn, you (or the police) now have at least his identity... Banks have an obligation to be positively sure about their customer's real-world identity before they open an account for them (the "know your customer" rule), as part of the regulations against money laundering.
There is a reason why most phishers use unwitting intermediaries ("money mules"): bank transfers are not anonymous for the receiver, and the receiver will be found out.
With Pay-Pal, on the other hand, you are at the whim of a company who isn't accountable to any banking rules (because it is not a bank), and who doesn't hesitate to confiscate or freeze account's contents if they believe you associated with somebody who associated with somebody who they believe defrauded them.
I gave up on these sites years ago as soon as it became apparent they were all unreliable. Reviews are either gamed or posted by someone with completely different standards to me so carried no value. Just go check reviews of hotels you've been and compare with your own experience. None of them have any consistency.
So there are honestly people out there who read reviews from people who may not have even bought the product and consider them true?
Personally, if I were TripAdvisor, Amazon, or whatever equivalent, it would be a requirement to have actually purchased the goods you're reviewing before being allowed to post a review.
One of the websites I use for hotels does just that - unless you've booked the hotel through them and stayed there you can't post a review. I don't think a reputation-destroying service would be a viable business model (even excluding legal complications) if you had to pay your competitors in order to post a bad review on them.
And, I pay no attention to the reviews. I pay attention to the responses, if any. If a site lists your hotel (presumably WITH your permission, or you'd ask for it to be removed) and you get a bad response, you should reply to it. Like on eBay, or in real life shops, it's not what the negative comments say, it's how you deal with those complaints that matters.
Nobody runs a hotel that has never received a complaint in its entire history. But there are lots of places that receive complaints and ignore them because they just don't care.
I went to Slashdot and the service was terrible. They treated me badly and I think they cloned my credit card.
Right, anyone know CmdrTaco's number?
This is nothing more than a protection racket. When the book gets slammed on them it's going to slam hard - assuming there's a judge out there with enough Internet competence to pull it off.
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I wonder if any of their staff are FBI. Just reminds me, you know, of certain strategies. I'm not implying anything though. I solemnly swear it.
- Yertle
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
The big problem with cyber crime is the lack of long-term storage of complaints. I got a scam email from Spain, claiming to be from a friend stranded in Madrid without a passport. I sent it on to the Guardia Civil. They sent me back a bunch of guidelines on not being scammed online.
Now, I didn't expect my single little failed fraud attempt to merit individual investigation. I had hoped that they would put it on file, and use it as supporting evidence for conspiracy in a larger case later on, but no-one tracks these things.
A group I frequent on Facebook was getting spammed for weeks by the same person advertising loans (in USD, in a group about a Scottish pub meetup). Every day, they'd get reported, and the message deleted. But even Facebook didn't seem to bother to track the individual complaints and spot the pattern.
So yes, review sites should be able to spot the pattern, but they won't. Because that costs money, and the internet is for cheapskates.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
isn't this exactly what yelp does?
Hello. This is Rachael from Cardholder Associates. There is currently no problem with your credit account, but...
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
It';s been proven that both Yelp and TripAdvisor will phone businesses moments after bad reviews are posted and offer to have them hidden for a large sum of money - Yelp in particular strongly denied this then were caught at it again a few weeks later
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
'be a shame if someone gave it a bad review.
It really makes you wonder about how many people are using their brain. If they continuously read bad comments, people should realize they are on a trash web site and don't take valuable information from it.
maybe back in the naive 90s you could believe an online review as honest but for the last decade at least everything on the internet has been some kind of sales pitch. viral marketing is totally out of control and this is the flip side of that as a sort of viral "anti-marketing". either way, on the internet you basically have to assume everything is some type of sales pitch.
The difficulty with the site is that the owner offered to delete the comments upon payment of £299 (around $500). If the purpose of the site was genuine (to allow complaints to be 'heard') why was it possible to take comments down? And what is to stop fake comments from being posted to attract further payment?
Fortunately for the solicitors in England and Wales, action was taken by the Law Society and the owner of the site was forced to take the site down and suffer the consequences of poorly defended legal action.
That action was taken by the Law Society as the only option available to the libeled solicitors was to launch an individual libel claim. The owner of the site had to respond to such claims and didn't fair particularly well in these either, particularly when it was clear that he had offered to take the comments down for a payment (see paragraph 23).
The correct way to legally extort money is to call it an investigation and processing fee, rather than an offer to take the review down. The investigation will inevitably turn up the fact that the review was not submitted in good faith and/or by a nut job, and it will be taken down, which is what the lawyer wanted, but the investigation and processing fee in that case would be legitimate, even if the whole thing was automated or partially automated - there's no reason you wouldn't pay some broke college student 1-2% of the processing fee to actually perform an investigation process on a contract rather than a permanent employment basis, as piecework, in order to avoid actually becoming an employer, and as long as you paid your taxes, there's pretty much nothing to be done about it.
To avoid any appearance of impropriety whatsoever, you could also post positive reviews, and justify listing all negative reviews before positive ones on the basis that people in need of a lawyer would be best served by the review site by knowing as quickly as possible if the lawyer failed in a case similar to theirs -- so a lawyer with 100 reviews and a 96% positive rating would still have the 4 bad reviews listed before everything else that said good things, and that is what people would see first.
Taking this approach, $5 worth of investigation might not be enough, and even if it were, factually bad reviews would stick to a lawyer on the review site, which is maybe not a bad thing... it pretty much puts them in the same boat as trademark registration, where you have to zealously defend your trademark by spending money, only in this case, you pay the review site, rather than paying lawyers (perhaps adding some much needed symmetry to the universe in the process, but I digress...).
Note that I'm not recommending this as an honorable business model, but it's one that works pretty well for a couple of "review sites" here in the US, and in that case, even a libel case would have to name the original reviewer, rather than the site, as long as the site doesn't have employees posting the negative reviews in the first place (libel laws differ in the US, and astroturfing bad reviews in order to get people to pay for advertising is one of the techniques used by one of the putative review sites).
... there is merit to having an open forum as long as it's censored....
It sounds like blackmail to me. I believe that legal action can be taken against this company. Bad move on their part.
"There are legitimate reputation improvement companies out there."
No, there aren't. What's legitimate about applying "poisoning the well"-strategies to mitigate the impact of negative reviews?
Of course, a negative review by Joe Blow may be factually incorrect and written by a troll or a moron with an axe to grind. Welcome to the Internet.
Yelp's business model is the same, so anyone posting a yelp review is just helping them scam other people.
is just as repugnant.
I remember when Yelp got caught doing this.
The same sort of subtle or not too subtle shakedown / "protection" / extortion has been around since forever. It just found it's way into a newer platform which makes it even easier to stay anonymous.
"geez, nice office ya got here. be a shame if anything happened to it. Vinny, what you think?"
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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... and welcome to our new Dicey overlords