Oobah Butler knew it was wrong to
write fake online reviews for restaurants where he had never dined.
But he was 21, broke, and living in his parents’
house in Feckenham, an English village 185km northwest of London. A faceless
vendor on a website that advertised freelance work offered to pay him 10 pounds
(about $15 at the time) for each review he wrote and posted on the travel site
Tripadvisor.
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The job was simple. He would receive an
email with the restaurant’s name. Then he would log into one of the four or
five profiles he had set up on Tripadvisor to avoid suspicion, look at pictures
of the restaurant’s food, and study the menu.
The reviews were always positive (raving
was a job requirement) and “verbose”, he said.
One post said a waiter was so attentive he
should get a raise. Another said something along the lines of “this place has
one of the finest Greek pastries in London”.
“I wasn’t even living in London at the
time,” Butler said. “I was writing from a very limited experience of curry
houses and chip shops. At the time I was more versed in beans and toast.”
It has been 10 years since Butler, now 30
and actually living in London, has written false reviews, but plenty of others
have stepped in where he left off.
As customers rely more and more on the ratings of people who say they have patronized a restaurant or a hotel, the need to update technology that separates authentic posts from false ones is only growing.
In 2022, Yelp, another review site, said
its moderators removed more than 700,000 posts that violated its policies —
including many that were abusive or deceptive. In 2020, more than 26 million
reviews were posted on Tripadvisor. The company said it took down nearly 1
million it deemed fraudulent, according to its 2021 transparency report.
Fake reviews have led to legal
consequences. In 2018, the owner of PromoSalento, an Italian company offering
to write paid reviews of hospitality businesses, was sentenced to nine months
in prison after an Italian court determined that he had used a fake identity to
write false reviews on Tripadvisor.
In November, Google filed a lawsuit against
dozens of companies and websites, accusing them of carrying out “a large-scale
scam” to mislead small businesses by selling them “fake or worthless services”,
including “the option of essentially flooding a competitor’s business profile”
found on Google search with fake negative reviews or ratings.
Sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor say false
reviews represent a tiny percentage of the overall posts that make it online.
They point to their use of technology and human investigators, which allows
them to weed out bad posts so they rarely get published.
Still, as customers rely more and more on
the ratings of people who say they have patronized a restaurant or a hotel, the
need to update technology that separates authentic posts from false ones is
only growing.
In October, representatives from Yelp,
Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, Google, and several other review sites met for a
one-day closed-door conference in San Francisco to discuss how they could work
together to tackle fake online reviews. It was the first time such a meeting
had been held, said Becky Foley, the senior director of trust and safety at
Tripadvisor, which organized the summit. The US Federal Trade Commission, which
is looking into strengthening penalties against companies that solicit and sell
fake reviews, also sent a representative, Foley said.
A computer algorithm can flag a pattern or a post, but when questionable reviews need deeper scrutiny, sites rely on specialized detectives
The big business of fake review writers “is
bad for all of us”, she said. “If people don’t trust reviews on Yelp, then
they’re not going to trust reviews on Tripadvisor.”
Sleuths on a missionReview sites use automated systems with
built-in algorithms to scour data and detect inauthentic or problematic posts.
Neither Yelp nor Tripadvisor would provide
details of how their systems work because they did not want to telegraph the
knowledge to potential fraudsters.
There are some obvious examples of a
questionable post. For instance, a large number of positive reviews coming from
a hotel in Cancún, Mexico, might suggest that the posts are being generated by
the business itself, not by people who have stayed there.
Overwhelmingly, false posts are positive,
Foley said. They can come through paid writers or from patrons who feel
pressured by the business to post a glowing review or are offered incentives to
do so.
Noorie Malik, vice president for user operations
at Yelp, said some hotels thrust smart screens in front of guests as they are
leaving and ask them to leave reviews on the spot, which could pressure them
into giving unearned praise.
One hotel in Buena Park, California,
offered discounts to guests who agreed to write five-star reviews, Malik said.
Yelp said it learned of the discounts from one of its users.
That is just the kind of tip a human
investigator is waiting to pounce on. A computer algorithm can flag a pattern
or a post, but when questionable reviews need deeper scrutiny, sites rely on
specialized detectives, who say they also work proactively, looking for
potential abuses.
Sometimes investigators conduct sting
operations, going on websites that sell reviews and pretending to be business
owners seeking to boost their ratings, Foley said.
“At any given time, I probably have three
or four conversations going with different fraudsters that are out there,” said
one senior investigator at Tripadvisor who has worked for the company for 15
years and was a mechanic before he started.
The investigators at Tripadvisor come from
a wide range of backgrounds. Some were police officers or detectives who
investigated fraud or child exploitation. Others worked in cybersecurity.
The two who spoke to the New York Times
asked to remain anonymous and, during an online interview, kept their faces
hidden out of fear they might be targeted. Some investigators have been
threatened by users who were taken off the site after they were found to have
written false reviews, Foley said.
“At any given time, I probably have three or four conversations going with different fraudsters that are out there,” said one senior investigator at Tripadvisor
The biggest requirements for the job are
curiosity and tenacity, said Robert O’Neill, the senior investigations manager
of trust and safety at Tripadvisor.
Successful investigators, he said, should
have “this idea of not leaving well enough alone”.
‘It’s basically extortion’Butler, the London writer, said his
experience writing false posts made him “obsessed” with Tripadvisor’s review
system and the power it seemed to hold over the public and restaurant owners.
Butler took his deceit to new heights in
2017, when he made up a restaurant and began writing fake reviews about it. He
called it the Shed at Dulwich, a name inspired by the run-down backyard behind
an apartment he rented for 800 pounds a month.
He described it as a unique dining
experience that was open by appointment only and served entrees named after
moods like “empathetic”, “lust”, and “contemplation”. He and his friends wrote
enough five-star reviews that after a few months, the Shed rose to become the
top-rated restaurant in London on Tripadvisor.
Butler opened the restaurant for one night,
never charging the guests for packaged lasagnas and macaroni and cheese he and
his friends served them.
When he revealed his ruse in a Vice
article, he was bombarded with media attention. An anchor on “Good Morning
Britain” called him “naughty”. An investor in Dubai said he would pay Butler to
replicate what he did with the Shed for his own restaurant, which did not even
exist yet.
He also heard from restaurant owners, who
said his experiment underscored the problem of trying to placate customers to
get high ratings.
“There is a real sense of injustice that
people who work in hospitality feel toward these platforms,” Butler said.
That feeling is familiar to Chris Wiken,
the owner of the Packing House, a restaurant in Milwaukee that his parents
opened in 1974.
For years, he said he has dealt with
negative posts from two types of people: customers who wait until they leave
the restaurant to complain online and reviewers who never ate at the restaurant
at all.
When he replies to their posts, he says, he
has learned they are typically looking for the same thing: money or gift
certificates.
“It’s basically extortion,” Wiken said.
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