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Brooklyn Yogurt Shop Sting Snares Fake Reviewers For NY Attorney General
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."
that's huge money for such little work. especially in countries like bangladesh.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"Yogurt! Yogurt! I hate Yogurt! Even with strawberries."
I am officially gone from
What has the world come to?!
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?
I've never used your services. Are you somehow relevant somewhere?
Did she yelp?
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. . . .
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.
I'm unclear: was this fake Yogurt shop actually listed on Yelp? Or did he just pose as a Yogurt shop owner and seek the help of SEO firms?
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?
Yeah, but she gave you a terrible review afterwards.
Where are the feds with this one? IP spoofing was one of the charges the feds used to intimidate Aaron Swartz.
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.
which is totally what she said
This sounds suspiciously like a Seinfeld episode.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
What *exactly* have they been fined for? For being wrong on the Internet? There'd be huge financial opportunity in that.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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. 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.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
And what rules were broken ? Last time I checked, we still had free speech. IF charging fraud, who was injured and how much did they lose due to this. This is ADVERTISING. . . .
This is the best article ever published. It completely fulfilled my need for information and informed commentary.
Where are my mod points?!
I am shocked - shocked! - to find that gambling is going on in here!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Require reviewers to post a "selfie" with the product, at the place of business, and so on. They should have a profile picture too, naturally.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
>And what rules were broken
http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/nycode/GBS/22-A/350-a
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.
I doubt Microsoft has to pay anybody.
There's plenty of people who will uncritically defend or attack pretty much anything.
So there will always be people who say "Microsoft is teh awesome and Apple is teh suxor", and similarly there will be people who say the opposite.
People get invested in this stuff, and then becoming drooling idiots when anybody says anything that contradicts what they think.
Slashdot is just a place where we see the really polarized sentiment much more often.
Do you sometimes wish you'd replied in the right thread?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I suspect most people lurking on this site have enough brains and savvy to ferret out many fake reviews posted on such sites, or at least take things with a very large grain of salt.
That is assuming we take the time. Then there is the rest of the population, who may glance at a Yelp! rating and take action from there.
It took me about 2 minutes years ago to conclude that rating sites like this would have a low accuracy rate. Why? I own a small business, and experience the general public first hand.
Further example: on Amazon, people can rate things for sale. A fair % of those ratings have nothing to do with the thing for sale, but with problems like late shipping or damage goods.
I don't anything against the lowest common denomnator, except that it's low and common.
Online reviews? LOL.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Maybe he was talking about eating and reviewing yogurts while driving.
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 off finding a forum involved in the product and getting information that way, also if you get involved with a bad product/service look into taking a few minutes to complain to the BBB or whatever is appropriate, other wise nothing changes.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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.
... until all the fake reviewers are in prison for 10 years, and the executives of the businesses doing this in prison for 30 years.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Discovering fake stuff on the internet is easy. Proving which miscreants posted it is hard.
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 stuff sent out on television stations or hollered from pulpits or whispered from ear to ear across backyard fences. Gossip is popular but is only sometimes true.
Believe what I say.
This sting operation is a total waste of time and is itself a fraud, designed to make you think the NY a-g is protecting you. He's not. First of all, this is not a real problem. No one over the age of six is taken in by fake reviews. Second, once burned twice shy--if you are taken in once, you never will be again. No state action needed. Third, the spoofers will find a new way to post fake reviews. Go chase ripoff landlord, Mr. Schneiderman, if you want to do something that will help a lot of people.
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."
You read the summary???
is all I can think of.
it's just not that big a deal, as an analysis of Society's Use Of Yelp (and others) would have determined.
and as some folks have said.. ain't that yelp's problem? are they gonna police online resume sites too?
No, she yiffed.
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?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
My guess is that it has something to do with getting paid to write fake reviews. This likely pushes it into a violation of false advertising laws, or fraud.
But here, it is someone else lying about the products of a company, not the company directly themselves.
Reviews are not ads....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Most, virtually all, of the book reviews you find on the back of the books are fake and paid for, the only difference is the person who is named is the one who recieved the money. I hear that kind of stuff happens with lots of the 'reviews' out there. Never trust a reviewer you don't know. This is nothing new, not even if you slap 'on the internet' onto it.
Starting a Tor client and using random exit nodes is "advanced"?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Your winnings, sir!
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).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
Is there another site that is better? I'm not making a tu quoque argument here, I just want alternatives.
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.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
It's not like you'll be able to identify them by their face in those instances.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
" 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."
Doesn't this qualify as entrapment by law enforcement?
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
Not really. IANAL, but I have had lawyers explain this one to me. The sting didn't force the firms to actually do anything illegal. There was always the option of the firm saying "That is not a service we can provide, but here's some services that may help your situation..." then list off services that fall in line with the law. Entrapment only happens when there's coercion to convince someone to do something that they wouldn't normally do. For instance, if the enforcement repeatedly contacted the same firm and specifically asked for the illegal service, and after several refusals, the firm gave in and began setting up an the illegal boosting, if the defense could provide a case that entrapment occurred, the prosecution would have to prove that the firm was predisposed to commit the act in the first place, which would be difficult if the defense had recorded conversations / time-stamps originating from the Sting-Op.
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Give him a break: he wrote that while waiting for the light to turn green.
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 guess". Instead you tend to get two types of responders to these surveys: either they absolutely loved it, or they absolutely hated it. With reviews you get a third category of self selected responders, those who want to write something that looks and feels like a professional review despite having no experience at it.
Now also add in the gaming of the system and it's becomes untrustworthy.
What surprises me is that New York has laws against this. Isn't this just a different type of fiction writing? Free speech is not allowed? I don't see any fraud unless New York City is now the most gullible city in the world.
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 eat without it?
It is nearly impossible to get a good customer generated review. It just will not happen unless you make the review mandatory, otherwise you will only get self selected reviewers.
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 feeling that they made the right choice and they're now a part of the "club". If they try a different place they'll likely give it a worse review than it deserves so that their personal choice becomes enhanced in comparison. If their favorite place drops in the rating then that's bad, it would imply that they are not going to the most cool fro-yo shops in the city and so they need to start passing out more glowing and hateful reviews. Meanwhile no one ever writes a calm and rational review that says "they have frozen yoghurt, 6 flavors, 10 toppings, the floor is clean, and the furniture is plastic, what else do you need to know?"
Just like sports and politics and other competition, this is a fight between us and them.
Certainly you can lie about your products. Everyone selling a product does this. "Best Pizza in Town" would be a crime otherwise.
I typically use yelp on my phone when I'm on vacation or in a new place to find out what's nearby. Local papers are also going to be skewed by bribes and biases. Taking a chance is not really something I want to do. I'm cheap. I don't eat out much: I'm not going to sample ALL the resturaunts even in my city, so why not just sample the best ones? I also like that I can show only cheap restaurants. Just because I'm cheap doesn't mean I don't prefer good food. It's not all about service quality. In fact, I don't care about service. And the recommendations for what to eat at a resturaunt have been good to me in the past. I could and do ask the staff what they recommend, but often they're too timid to actually suggest anything. I get a lot of "Uh, what do you like?"
Look at it this way: if the reviews are so arbitrary, then how is yelp not picking a place at random?
The thing is, these 'reviews' are not opinions. The yogurt shop that the reviews were for did not exist. There is no way that the people who wrote the 'reviews' could have an opinion on the yogurt shop.
On top of that, the individuals may not have broken any law, while the company did.
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.
I was actually being serious. I've no idea what Yelp is, and have only ever heard of it from the flaming they receive (maybe rightly) on this site.
Still, excellent witty retort there. Be sure to high-five your buddies on your way back in from recess.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
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
You read the summary???
"You READ something on /. ?"
FTFY
This seems like a stretch to me, legally, and an arbitrary abuse of power. But, I am not a lawyer or related entity.
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.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I shouldn't have to do this for you since you were replying to AC....
Try this link: www.yelp.com
No brain, no pain.
that's an assertion without proof. i thought the posters (yes, even AC ones) were better than that on Slashdot.
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 actually astroturfers who've been paid under the table to make up comments.
Your business suffers, not because your yoghurt is worse, but because people who would've bought your yoghurt buy the other shop's yoghurt instead - based on a lie.
Should it be legal to redirect the spending of others by lying? Should it be legal to increase one's wealth by lying? Should it be legal to damage the livelihoods of other people by lying?
The key point here is that there was no yogurt shop. People were writing fake reviews for a fake business.
The key response is that the people writing the fake reviews didn't know the business was fake. For a blunt example, if you offer to murder people in return for money, someone pays you to murder Bob, you sneak into what you think is Bob's house, you put two rounds into what you think is Bob's head, and then the lights come on and it's a cardboard silhouette and the police are putting you in cuffs, you don't get to walk free just because you didn't actually kill a person named Bob.
The astroturfers were writing deceitful reviews in return for money. To be blunt: fraud. Which is illegal - and unethical - regardless of whether the act involved an (unknown to them) fake business or one of the many real businesses they'd previously serviced (evidence of which was uncovered in the operation).
If I may be politely bold, your comments sound suspiciously like your brain is subconsciously looking for some way to rationalize a conditioned response to actions taken by those you hold in poor repute rather than acknowledge an occasion where they actually appear to be behaving properly (ironically, this kind of conditioning is often experienced by those working in law enforcement for long periods of time).