Oobah Butler knew it was wrong to write fake online reviews for restaurants he’d never dined at.
But he was 21, broke and living in his parents’ house in Feckenham, an English village 180 km northwest of London. A faceless vendor at a website promoting freelance work offered to pay him £10 (about $15 at the time) for each review he wrote and posted on the travel site Tripadvisor.
The job was easy. He receives an email with the name of the restaurant. He then logged into one of the He Four or He Five profiles he had set up on TripAdvisor to avoid suspicion, looked at pictures of the restaurant’s dishes, and studied the menu.
Reviews were always positive (rave reviews were a requirement of the job) and “redundant.”
One post mentioned the waiter was very attentive and needs a raise. Another said, “This place has one of the best Greek pastries in London.”
“I didn’t even live in London at the time,” said Butler. “I was writing from very limited experience with curry houses and chip shops. At the time, I was familiar with beans and toast.”
It’s been a decade since Butler, now 30 and actually living in London, wrote a fake review, but many others have stepped up where he left off.
In 2022, Yelp, another review site, said moderators removed more than 700,000 posts that violated its policies. In 2020, more than 26 million reviews were posted on TripAdvisor. The company says it has removed nearly 1 million of him deemed fraudulent, according to its 2021 transparency report.
Fake reviews have legal consequences. In 2018, the owner of PromoSalento, an Italian company that offers to write paid reviews for hospitality businesses, was ruled by an Italian court that he used fake IDs to write false reviews on TripAdvisor. was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment.
In November, Google filed a lawsuit against dozens of companies and websites, accusing them of perpetrating a “massive fraud” to mislead small businesses and selling “fake or worthless services.” bottom. profile” was found in his Google search with fake negative reviews and ratings.
According to sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor, fake reviews make up only a small percentage of all posts that make it online. They point to the use of technology and human investigators. This allows us to filter out bad posts so they are rarely published.
Yet, as customers increasingly rely on ratings from people who say they patronize restaurants and hotels, the need to update technology that distinguishes between genuine and fake posts only increases.
In October, representatives of Yelp, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, Google, and several other review sites met for a one-day closed-door conference in San Francisco to discuss how to tackle fake online reviews. We discussed whether we could cooperate with Becky Foley, senior director of trust and safety at TripAdvisor, which hosted the summit, said it was the first time such a conference had been held. Foley said he also sent representatives to the Federal Trade Commission, which is considering tougher penalties for companies that solicit and sell fake reviews.
A big company of fake review writers “is bad for all of us,” she said. “If you don’t trust Yelp reviews, you won’t trust TripAdvisor reviews either.”
detective on duty
Review sites use automated systems with embedded algorithms to scrutinize data to detect inauthentic or questionable posts.
Neither Yelp nor Tripadvisor provided details on how the system works.
There are some obvious examples of questionable posts. For example, a large number of positive reviews from a hotel in Cancun, Mexico, may suggest that the posts are generated by the business itself, rather than by the people who stayed there.
Overwhelmingly, the false posts are positive, Foley said. It may come from patrons who are offered incentives to do so.
Noorie Malik, Yelp’s vice president of user operations, said some hotels are asking guests to leave a review on the spot by holding a smart screen in front of them as they leave. .
A hotel in Buena Park, Calif., offered discounts to guests who agreed to write five-star reviews, Malik said. Yelp said he learned about the discount from one of its users.
That’s exactly the kind of tip that human investigators are waiting to pounce on. Computer algorithms can flag patterns and posts, but if a questionable review needs further scrutiny, the site can turn to expert detectives. can rely on
Investigators sometimes go undercover and visit websites that sell reviews, pretending to be business owners trying to boost their ratings, Foley said.
A Senior Investigator who has worked at TripAdvisor for 15 years and was a mechanic prior to joining said:
TripAdvisor researchers come from a variety of backgrounds. Some were police officers and detectives investigating fraud and child exploitation. Others worked in cybersecurity.
The two men, who spoke to the New York Times, requested anonymity and hid their faces during online interviews for fear of being targeted. Foley said he has been threatened by users who have been removed from the site after doing so.
Curiosity and persistence are what the job requires most, said Robert O’Neill, senior research manager for trust and safety at TripAdvisor.
A successful investigator, he said, should have “this idea of not being away enough alone.”
Another senior TripAdvisor investigator said he applied for the job on the advice of a friend. A friend of mine does relentless research on vacation spots and restaurants, so he thought content would be the perfect moderator for him.
“My friends thought I was a spreadsheet nerd,” said the investigator, who worked as an office manager and graphic arts before joining TripAdvisor 19 years ago.
For him, revealing false reviews is personal.
He remembered when he went to London on business a few years ago. In haste, he ran into a restaurant – “unvetted food selection” – to purchase a chicken hand pie he had eaten on the way to a meeting. I messed up the next step.
“These are the moments in our lives that we look back and remember, and to ruin it with a bad meal or a bad hotel,” he said. “I feel very good that I can play a role.”
The FTC declined to confirm a representative to the October summit, but that same month considered creating a rule “to prevent unfair or deceptive marketing using reviews and endorsements.” announced that it is
“This scourge continues,” FTC Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in a statement.
“Unfair or fraudulent” conduct or practices in commerce are prohibited under Federal Trade Commission law. While that language could include the buying and selling of fake reviews, the FTC will more clearly define what is prohibited and give authorities civil penalties, such as fines, for first offenses. He said he was proposing a rule that would give him the power to seek punishment.
The agency has asked for public comment on the rule. Several companies, including Yelp, Google and Tripadvisor, have written testimonies in support of the initiative.
“It’s basically blackmail.”
Butler, a London writer, said his experience writing a false post made him ‘hooked’ on TripAdvisor’s review system and its seeming power over the public and restaurant owners. said.
Butler took his deception to new heights in 2017 when he created a restaurant and began writing fake reviews about it. This is a name inspired by the dilapidated backyard in the backyard of the apartment he rented for his £800 a month.
He described it as a unique dining experience that opens by appointment only and offers appetizers named after moods such as “empathy,” “desire,” and “contemplation.” He and his friends wrote enough of his 5 star reviews a few months later to become the highest rated restaurant in London on Trip Advisor.
Butler only opened the restaurant for one night and never charged guests for the packaged lasagna and macaroni and cheese that he and his friends provided.
He came under the spotlight of the media when he revealed his ruse in a side article. The ‘Good Morning Britain’ anchor called him a ‘naughty’. An investor in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said he would pay Butler to replicate what he did at Shed in his own restaurant, which didn’t even exist yet.
He also heard from restaurant owners who said his experiments highlighted the problem of trying to appease customers to get high ratings.
“There is a real sense of unfairness that people who work in the hospitality industry feel towards these platforms,” said Butler.
That feeling is familiar to Chris Wicken, owner of The Packing House, a restaurant his parents opened in Milwaukee in 1974.
Over the years, he has dealt with negative posts from two types of people.
When he replied to their posts, he said he found they were usually looking for the same thing: money or gift certificates.
“It’s basically blackmail,” Wicken said.
He said over the course of five years, he spent thousands of dollars sending gift cards worth $150 to $250 to get bad reviews removed.
“What’s the alternative? They can go on and keep screwing you up,” he said. “They can create new profiles and keep writing fake reviews.”
He has a 4-star rating on both Yelp and TripAdvisor. But he said he would trade all positive posts for the end of the online review site.
And despite the best efforts of sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor and federal pressure to root out fake reviews, writers know that what they’re doing can be wrong. Even so, the financial incentive to seek out and write those posts remains strong.
Butler has written a book about his adventures as a fake reviewer, summing it up:
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
