Yelp Names Businesses Caught Buying Fake Reviews

September 24, 2023 Business, News

Engadget reports:

Since 2012, Yelp has caught nearly 5,000 businesses engaging in shady tactics, like paying customers for favorable ratings or hiring people to write phony reviews. Now, the company has a new tool to help people — and maybe the feds — track businesses that have tried to manipulate their standing on the review platform.

Yelp is releasing a new index that tracks every U.S establishment it’s ever caught engaging in “suspicious” activity to influence its reviews.

For Yelp, the index is both its latest move in a long-running war on fake reviews, as well as a nod to a changing regulatory environment in which fake reviews are attracting increasing scrutiny from regulators. The FTC recently proposed a formal ban on fake reviews with penalties of up to $50,000 for businesses caught buying, selling or manipulating online reviews.

Ars Technica reports:



Of course, the fake review problem goes beyond Yelp. The FTC reported that earlier this year, academic researchers infiltrated “incentivized review services geared toward Amazon” that solicited five-star reviews for more than 240,000 products.

On Facebook, 250 groups were discovered brokering paid reviews of Amazon products—some with more than 500,000 members.

The FTC noted that while Amazon claims to delist products soliciting incentivized reviews, only 25 of 1,600 products tracked by researchers were removed within a six-week period. Amazon declined to comment.

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