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.'"

Comments

It was only a matter of time

[FirephoxRising]

People and businesses value their online reputations, so these protection rackets were always going to come.

Re:It was only a matter of time

[ArsenneLupin]

Couldn't the company just forward the mail proposing the "deal" to the review site's admin, who will (hopefully) quickly catch on, especially if more than one business has similar complaints!

Re:It was only a matter of time

[asdf7890]

You are banking on:

1. The site bothering to monitor its email with any regularity. Until they see your report, the fake review is still up where potential customers can see it.
2. The site taking your complaint at face value - you could be a genuinely bad business trying to silence genuine complaints by maknig shit up yourself. Until you can convince them of your case, the fake review may still be up where potential customers can see it. Conversly, if you made a genuine bad review it could go the other way and your views could be taken offline at the behest of the bad company until you prove them to be true so your warning won't reach potential customers.
3. The site carrying the bad review not being part of the scheme. Either through association by choice, by actually being the same people when you dig down to details, or by being coerced into co-operating with the criminals, the site could be taking a cut of the proceeds (or just being "protected" themselves).

So unfortunately that woudl not be a generally workable solution.

For reference, search for the many scandals over the years concerning the reviews on sites like TripAdviser, Yell, and their ilk.

Re:It was only a matter of time

[ae1294]

I think the best way to sting them is in the payment process, pay with bad checks or on another tack, highly traceable instruments and pass the info along to law enforcement.

Soo you're saying the best way to handle this is to commit a crime yourself, then gather up all the evidence and provide it to law enforcement?

We have a word for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a fairly textbook case of libel.

Re:We have a word for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not merely libel, it's fraud, possibly extortion, and of course, ridiculously stupid.

One day, shortly after moving into an apartment complex, this guy I've never met knocks on my door and tells me my van has a flat tire, and that, oh, BTW, he works at a nearby tire repair place, and would be happy to fix it for me, all I have to do is bring it to the shop...

Oddly enough, I had driven it the day before, and the tire was fine when I left it. I happened to have an air-pump, so I inflated it, and it seemed to hold air, it hadn't been stabbed or anything, (happily) but someone let the air out, and this guy I'd never met just happened to know that the van was associated with the resident of my apartment... and he just happened to work at a place that fixes tires... anyway, I guess he was fucking retarded, or thought I was. Needless to say, I wouldn't have dreamed of taking the tire to this guy or his shop, because this ploy was really fucking obvious.

Similarly, this ploy is pathetic, and it's shocking anyone could be dumb enough to think that it would work. Sad.

Re:We have a word for this...

[JoeMerchant]

It's not merely libel, it's fraud, possibly extortion, and of course, ridiculously stupid.

And, if you're seeking relief through the courts, good luck with the jurisdiction issues, response time, and general lack of connection to reality that is the justice system.

Re:We have a word for this...

[yurtinus]

Right, 'cause /. nerds are all about physical confrontation...

The best way to deal with this

[Anonymous Coward]

This post was removed due to Dice content standards violations.

Re:The best way to deal with this

[Tukz]

Hmm, it looks legit.

A quick Google search on /., found several of these messages.
Worrying.

Would like an "official" word on this.

Re:The best way to deal with this

[beelsebob]

Because if a spammer wanted to make dice look bad, clearly they would only post one such message... Wait... no.

Re:The best way to deal with this

[BasilBrush]

This post was added due to Gullibility standards violations.

Re:The best way to deal with this

[Fjandr]

Started here:

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3126413&cid=41374821

The first one is near the end of the above comment section.

Re:The best way to deal with this

[sumdumass]

I'm pretty sure its not real. /. has only removed a few posts and those had to do with court orders if I remember right. I think it had something to do with the MPEG dvd encryption code.

Re:The best way to deal with this

[flimflammer]

Come on, man. This troll has been going on for weeks now. People just don't like the Dice owns slashdot so they post this shit.

If Dice were really removing posts, they'd be deleting them, not advertising to the world "We are censoring your discussions!" It boggles the mind the gullibility you and the GP share.

Re:The best way to deal with this

[viking099]

The only one I know of had to do with someone publishing the text of a Scientology exam manual. The CoS threatened to sue if it wasnt' removed, and they removed it, then posted a story about it, explaining what happened and why it was removed.

Not the first

[asdf7890]

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).

Trip Advisor?

[Zemran]

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.

Re:Trip Advisor?

[shilly]

I really doubt that "most reviews on TripAdvisor are generic". I've read reviews of maybe 30 places across three countries in the past year, and I've read a lot of shitty reviews but none has appeared to be even remotely generic / "professional". How about posting links to say 5 different reviews that you think are generic, so you can show what you say is true? Ought to be quick and easy to do if most reviews are generic.

Re:Trip Advisor?

[hairyfeet]

That's why I like the reviews on geek sites like NewEgg and even Amazon, its pretty easy to spot the actual owners and users and weed out the shills. Hell on my reviews on Amazon I've even had several nice back and forth conversations where someone will ask about this feature or that, or want to know what i thought of something like the TDP of a chip or how well it performed some task and I was happy to answer and even run benches or tests, whereas the shills are just gushing and glossing over any problems the average user might have.

This is why I tell folks looking at reviews to take everything they see with a LARGE grain of salt, because until there is an actual community built up where they can respond to shills and sorta self police the place you can't really trust anything you read. Worse you get sites that as you say actively engage in shilling and trolling for dollars where everything there is bought and paid for, those sites I consider beyond worthless and we geeks should be quick to point those out to everyone around us.

Remember guys WE are the ones the normals look to for advice, we the geeks of the world, its our duty to try to steer the normals away from the bad and toward the good because they just aren't jaded cynical bastards like we are and are easier to dupe.

Aha!

[dimeglio]

That might explain all the negative comments we see about Microsoft.

Re:Aha!

[Chrisq]

That might explain all the negative comments we see about Microsoft.

I'm still waiting for them to send me $500

Re:Aha!

[Zero__Kelvin]

No. It explains the few pro-Microsoft posts, though.

Best Countermeasures

[some old guy]

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.

Re:Best Countermeasures

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that the BBB is a protection racket too, don't you? People who pay the BBB can make their complaints go away. People who don't will have a page @ the BBB's website prominently featuring complaint after complaint.

Re:Best Countermeasures

[OzPeter]

They pedal reports because that's their business

Sure they peddle reports as part of their business. But there is a difference between advertising that you can buy reports from them, and them cold-calling you and trying to pressure you into buying a report. It is not the report that is scummy (although I have no idea if you actually get you monies worth) but the methodology used to sell it to you. Just google "Dun and Bradstreet scam" and see what you get

Re:Best Countermeasures

[tompaulco]

the Better Business Bureau
If I see that a site has purposely and prominently advertised affiliation with the BBB, that usually leads me to suspect that they have something to hide. You almost NEVER see BBB links on most of the big name sites, like Amazon, Google, etc. I was about to put NewEgg, but they DO have a BBB link. But, I can almost guarantee that you will see a BBB link on every single "Only Available on TV" product. Why? Because they are cheap junk that is not worth the money, but they BBB link might make a few more people buy their cheap junk.

Wiring the money unsafe?

[ArsenneLupin]

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.

Re:Wiring the money unsafe?

[ledow]

PayPal is a bank, in some countries (i.e. the EU), and regulated by appropriate financial services watchdogs. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be allowed to trade in those countries for very long as it would be nothing but an unregulated money laundering outfit.

That said, wire transfers are traceable, but that doesn't mean you get your money back. Credit cards, etc. have automatic, legally-backed payout when you mark a transaction as fraud, even if the fraudster has already withdrawn that money.

Re:Wiring the money unsafe?

[danb35]

I suspect the poster you're replying to is actually talking about the money transfer services like Western Union, not true bank wire transfers. Wire transfers have to go into a bank account, and the ownership of that bank account is known (by the receiving bank, at least, if not by the sender). They're not used very often in the U.S., though, because they tend to be expensive--$25 to send, and $15 to receive, seem to be common fees, though they can vary.

Re:Wiring the money unsafe?

[arth1]

They're not used very often in the U.S., though, because they tend to be expensive--$25 to send, and $15 to receive, seem to be common fees, though they can vary.

I just paid $35 for receiving a wire transfer to my BOFA account. The bank's web page says they charge $16 for incoming wire transfers from abroad, and it really should be $0, because it was sent as a SWIFT transfer in USD, marked with "sending bank pays all charges".
Why the extra? There's apparently a "telex fee", even though no telex was in use.
Oh, and I don't even get a copy of the SWIFT with the payment details.

Thank goodness the money was sent in USD, because the rates that US banks give their customers on exchange are ridiculous.

Here in USA, we have the most antiquated bank system in the world; worse, even, than the UK one.
Heck, people here still use cheques, for cripes sake. And the cards banks issue can't be used in large parts of Europe, because they still rely on a magnetic strip, not a chip.
And we have the most clueless bankers too. They don't even understand terms like giro and loro.

But to compensate, it's seriously overpriced.

Re:Wiring the money unsafe?

[DarkOx]

Because the US system is geared toward the EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) practice. EFT works really well between pretty much any US Financial entity, fast and usually free. Unless it is great deal of money or being deposited someone place like a brokerage, most institutions will make the funds immediate available, if you have any kind of existing relationship with them. Otherwise anything taking longer than 4 days to settle is pretty unusual.

Re:Wiring the money unsafe?

[arth1]

nostro = "our", meaning transfers or accounts (usu. in foreign currency) to accounts held elsewhere (usu. in foreign banks).
vostro = "their", meaning the same account seen from the opposite side of the fence.
loro = "their", meaning transfers or accounts (usu. in own currency) through a third party (intermediary) bank.

A loro transfer is the most common account/transfer method unless your bank actually has mutual accounts with the foreign bank.

A typical transfer from the US goes[*]:
sender
-> request to your bank's central office for a FX
-> debit of your account by main office
-> loro some big foreign bank here
-> nostro some big bank there
-> giro to account holder
and within a day, batched saldo (balance) adjustments between the banks

In contrast, a typical international transfer from pretty much anywhere else in the world is two or three steps.

[*]: Or rather, it doesn't unless you insist, because US banks tend to cut bank cheques so they can sit on the float for a week and take extra charges.

You can save a step and charges by picking a loro that can do direct deposit to the foreign account, or if you use a big bank, a nostro that doesn't require a third bank on the remote end. Of course, that means that your bank must be able to list what loro/nostro connections they have. And the bank employee either understand how transfers work, or be able to direct you to someone who does.

Re:Wiring the money unsafe?

[arth1]

You're lucky the US bank even knew what SWIFT was. A couple years ago I needed to transfer funds to my mom in the US. She lives in a small town but uses one of the major US banks. It took me over a week of emails and multiple calls to the bank to get the necessary information to make the transfer from a major European bank.

Hints for the next time:
Get your mother's account number and wire transfer routing number. The latter is usually not the same as the regular routing number.
Get the SWIFT address of your mother's bank's head office, unless they have a SWIFT address for transfers in USD.
When sending the money, insist on sending in USD, nostro your mother's banks head office, with both the routing number and account number specified.
Do not choose to pay the recipient's charges, because US banks will not honour that and will charge the recipient full charges regardless of whether they also get the mutually agreed-upon transfer fee from your bank. That's just free money for them.

IME, the transfer will only take minutes if done this way. Of course, the bank will likely sit on it until the next day before "clearing" it, despite it already being cleared by SWIFT. US banks are the worst float crooks in the world.

If sending in your own currency and without a routing number, even if through SWIFT, expect 3-4 days, and even more if they cut a cheque (no, I'm not kidding, alas).

Re:Wiring the money unsafe?

[Inda]

OK, I'll bite.

Worse than the UK one?

If I want to send anyone money in the UK here's what I do:

1. Login to my bank's website

2a. If I've sent money to this person before: type in their sort code, account number and value.

2b. If I've not sent money to this person before: two factor authorisation, type in their sort code, account number and value.

3. Click the Go button

This is called BACS and is instant for the vast majority of transactions and basically free. We also have the faster but more expensive CHAPS.

Of course, give me an International Bank Account Number (IBAN) and I can send money to anyone anywhere.

We freely give out bank account numbers too. There's not a lot you can do with them except pay money in.

Who uses Review sites?

[hairyfish]

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.

Re:Who uses Review sites?

[hcs_$reboot]

This is why I appreciate sites like imdb.com (films reviews), where you have to provide your cell phone number to which IMDB sends a SMS containing a code that you use to activate your reviewer and rater status.

Travel

[ledow]

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.

Re:Travel

[EmagGeek]

Reputable companies are starting to do that. Both Newegg and Amazon now tag reviews with whether the person writing it actually bought the product. It's a nice feature, except to date there is no check box that says "Don't Show Unverified Reviews" that I've seen. It's easy to skip over the trolls, but it'd be even nicer if I didn't even have to see them.

Re:Travel

[BasilBrush]

Apple started doing it on the App Store after the first couple of months. If you haven't bought the app, you aren't allowed to review it. The quality of the reviews immediately improved.

Re:Travel

[hairyfeet]

But if they only accepted reviews from ones that bought from them they'd frankly be giving up a lot of good honest reviews...well like mine actually. i buy CPUs and components from Amazon, NewEgg, TigerDirect, and a couple of little chip shops like StarMicro and once i've put a chip through its paces i tend to post a review to all of the above, why? Well because I don't buy many of the highest end chips and those and the bottom of the line chips are the only ones the review sites ever seem to test so I've found a lot of times those middle chips, your MOR chips, simply don't get really tested or reviewed and since that's the chips I use the most I review them.

I've not seen a dime from any of the above, hell neither they nor the CPU manufacturers have ever even given me a fricking t-shirt, but it'd always bug the shit out of me when i'd go looking for info on a chip or board and find there were ONLY reviews for the uber hot or the uber cheap, nothing in the middle, so I like to think I'm helping out all the guys like me that use those chips. I'll encode a couple of videos, run a few games, maybe use a benchmarking test or two and post what i find and from all the positives I've gotten i guess there are others like me looking for this info but if the only sites I was allowed to post to were the ones that I had bought that particular chip from? Well then a lot of those hunting for that info wouldn't find it, as chips for example seem to stay on Amazon longer than they do NewEgg or TigerDirect.

So you can't really judge only by whether they've bought from that site or not, you really need to look at the review as a whole and see if it and the poster's history is generally unbiased and thoughtful. If a poster has a history its really not hard to look at their reviews and see whether there is a pattern or not. I can understand that requirement from like hotel booking sites though, that is such a specialized niche that it really wouldn't be too hard to game that system whereas so many people buy chips that if someone like me was posting totally false info it wouldn't take long for someone to post "That's not what I'm seeing from the same chip" and get the post modded down appropriately.

Slashdot Smells

[telchine]

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?

Data storage, data mining.

[Half-pint HAL]

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.

Re:Data storage, data mining.

[crossmr]

Facebook's abuse department is a joke. They have a policy against people using personal pages for business, in the last 8 months I've reported dozens of these.. 8 months later, not a single one has been deleted and all continue to spam various regional groups.

They have absolutely zero credibility when it comes to this kind of thing.

Re:Data storage, data mining.

[KiloByte]

They have absolutely zero credibility.

Fixed it for you.

Re:Data storage, data mining.

[rwise2112]

There used to be abuse@fbi.gov - but that's been ignored for almost a decade now.

Abuse email addresses are normally used to report spam or such coming from the domain. For instance if you were receiving spam from xxxx@fbi.gov, then that is the place to report it.

Re:Data storage, data mining.

[cawpin]

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.

Oh, but they do. I did a similar thing, regarding about a scam letter, physical mail, I received several years ago. I got the normal "Thanks for reporting" response and thought nothing of it, as you did. About 6 months later I get an email from the US Federal Crime Victim Notification Service telling me that an investigation had been opened into the company I reported.

I've been getting regular updates through this system for about 3 years now up to and including verdict & sentencing. There were 6 or 8 people who were charged, a couple plead guilty to lesser charges, one was found guilty of some fairly serious charges and the ring leader was found guilty of many counts of fraud and related charges and sentenced to, if I remember correctly, 17 years in federal prison.

I was completely surprised by it because, like you, I had never seen anything come of the various things I have reported over the years. But, apparently, they do pay attention if they get enough complaints.

I have the perfect person to call and fix this

[cvtan]

Hello. This is Rachael from Cardholder Associates. There is currently no problem with your credit account, but...

Not new

[CdBee]

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

what if the review site is the one cashing in?

[CdBee]

Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0

Your perp did it wrong, there's a safer way

[tlambert]

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).