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Crackdown On Fake Online Reviews Sees 19 Companies Fined

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New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a crackdown on fake online reviews today. So far, nineteen companies have been fined a total of $350,000.

New York regulators will announce on Monday the most comprehensive crackdown to date on deceptive reviews on the Internet. Agreements have been reached with 19 companies to cease their misleading practices and pay a total of $350,000 in penalties.
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They really need to continue with this. The amount of fake "bad" reviews out there is aweful and it really hits small businesses harder than well known companies.
 
I always thought there should be a system to verify that you ordered from a store or ate the food at a restaurant. Something like a code at the bottom. I know it'd be hard for mom/pop shops, but with electronic cash registers, it should be able to hook into an online system to randomly assign a number that you use to post a review. It would be a closed system, but I'd be more willing to trust reviews from a system like that.
 
This is why companies pay other companies to write reviews online. Laws change when it's a 3rd party who reviews a product/place.
 
Online stores should only allow reviews of products by people who bought the same product from their particular site.

Take newegg for example, I have left reviews for products I did not buy from them, although I have the product. All it takes is someone with a login to leave a review...and logins are easy to create.

Still, this would not solve the problem where someone is being bribed to write a review for something they did buy, as the article alleges to have occurred.
 
BBA said:
Online stores should only allow reviews of products by people who bought the same product from their particular site.

Take newegg for example, I have left reviews for products I did not buy from them, although I have the product. All it takes is someone with a login to leave a review...and logins are easy to create.

Still, this would not solve the problem where someone is being bribed to write a review for something they did buy, as the article alleges to have occurred.
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Amazon flags you has a "verified" purchase. Doesn't stop the review producing companies from buying something under their account and then writing it off.
 
Must be some strange NY law? Who's to say people that review and item actually used it? No matter what the star rating is, I have to read many of the reviews, just to make sure it's real people with real reviews. Really pretty easy to tell.
 
az_max said:
I always thought there should be a system to verify that you ordered from a store or ate the food at a restaurant. Something like a code at the bottom. I know it'd be hard for mom/pop shops, but with electronic cash registers, it should be able to hook into an online system to randomly assign a number that you use to post a review. It would be a closed system, but I'd be more willing to trust reviews from a system like that.
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Unfortunately, it doesn't really help with companies that have marketing budgets. If you have the budget to put someone on staff to write fake reviews, it's a trivial exercise to have the products purchased at retail. In some cases, the company could probably even take the retail product back and resell it as refurbished.
 
350k/19 companies? Thats absolutely nothing. "Share " a song on the internet and youll pay 5x that.
 
Wait doesn't help take down bad reviews if you pay them? If the system isn't trusted then who cares if someone posts a fake good review?

For the others I get it.
 
Dragon Age 2 was the best game I've experienced in my life.



Signed,
Ballsy McDontgiveafuck
Biowa... err, unemployed.
 
Anytime i try to find a review of a piece of hardware;It takes an average of 7 Google pages before i find something like [H] or Anand er something legitimate. :mad:
 
az_max said:
I always thought there should be a system to verify that you ordered from a store or ate the food at a restaurant. Something like a code at the bottom. I know it'd be hard for mom/pop shops, but with electronic cash registers, it should be able to hook into an online system to randomly assign a number that you use to post a review. It would be a closed system, but I'd be more willing to trust reviews from a system like that.
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For that system to work you would need a database that stores every single item that a place sales and have it then keep track of every single purchase from every single person. I am pretty sure people would have a little bit of a privacy issue with that.
 
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