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I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

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Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#161

Post by Bill_Dimm »

Animats wrote: post #151

I'm very aware of this problem. I set up Sitetruth.com to try to combat it. Here's what Sitetruth has on Launchrock.[1] Is there an street address on the web site? No. Anything we can tie to a list of US businesses? No. Better Business Bureau link? No. SEC filings? No. Rating: Do Not Enter. SiteTruth takes the position, "when in doubt, rate it down". We'd use D&B data if it wasn't so expensive; this is just the demo…

> Better Business Bureau link?

Is lacking a BBB link supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-m...

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#162

Post by Animats »

Bill_Dimm wrote: post #161
Animats wrote: post #151

I'm very aware of this problem. I set up Sitetruth.com to try to combat it. Here's what Sitetruth has on Launchrock.[1] Is there an street address on the web site? No. Anything we can tie to a list of US businesses? No. Better Business Bureau link? No. SEC filings? No. Rating: Do Not Enter. SiteTruth takes the position, "when in doubt, rate it down". We'd use D&B data if it wasn't so expensive; this is just the demo…

> Better Business Bureau link? Is lacking a BBB link supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing? http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-m...

BBB links usually provide a way to get a street address, from the BBB site, for the business. The BBB pages also link back to the site they're describing, and we check that. (Yes, there are fake BBB links.)

SiteTruth can be fooled, but you usually have to commit a crime to do it. We cross-check with PhishTank to down-rate phishing sites, which helps put a lid on that problem.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#163

Post by nsxwolf »

dethstar wrote: post #75
wanderfowl wrote: post #70

If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot" by throwing a few dollars and some change into the case. Not because you make any money from your own "donation", but because it shows passers-by what the arrangement is, and adds an element of social pressure ("Somebody donated, so I should too!"). I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic…

Homeless do the opposite of the musician really, throw a coin/bill into their glass and they will take it out and save it somewhere else. "Nobody has donated, have some compassion" works for some.

I like when they pick out the pennies from my donations and throw them on the ground. I then pick them up, because the pennies are valuable to me.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#164

Post by zo1 »

vijayr wrote: post #84
nkrisc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Fiverr should hire a team to monitor the activity and authenticity of its sellers. That would cause most of their revenue to evaporate.

At some point they will do it - when they "grow up" and they can afford to crack down. Tumblr cracked down on porn once they became big. Yelp didn't care about fake reviews, but now they do as they've become big. And so on.

>"Tumblr cracked down on porn once they became big."

Define "cracked down"? Because from my perspective, there is plenty of it on Tumblr.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#165

Post by Animats »

digisth wrote: post #160
Animats wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, WHOIS data is of such low quality that it's useless. SSL cert data is of better quality, for OV (Organization Validated) and EV (Extended validation) certs. Contact addresses found in text on the web site are also useful. Those we match to commercial business directory information.

Considering that many smaller companies use e.g. CloudFlare's SSL, I'm not sure that would help them, but good to know.

We ignore Cloudflare's many SSL certs. We have a short blacklist of MITM-as-a-service content delivery networks. Here's my paper on that.[1]

The list is short. Here it is:

    cloudflare.com – a front-end network for sites, controlling 36,280 domains.
    incapsula.com – a front-end network for sites
    sonymusic.com – operates sites for their range of artists. 
    Janrainengage.com – customer tracking service
    edgecastcdn.net – Verizon caching system
    fiducia.de – security service for banks
    vin65.com – wine seller with many sites for various wine brands.
    practiceweb.co.uk – a hosting service for accountants
Sites which use those services are not blacklisted by Sitetruth, but the ownership data in their SSL certs is ignored as meaningless. The CA/Browser Forum is looking into ways to express this better in SSL certs. A cert with fifty unrelated businesses is just silly, and it's a transitional thing until everybody gets TLS-capable OSs and browsers so shared IP doesn't mean shared cert. (Windows XP/IE 6 being the problem).

[1] http://john-nagle.github.io/certscan/whoamitalkingto04.pdf

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#166

Post by barking »

wanderfowl wrote: post #70

If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot" by throwing a few dollars and some change into the case. Not because you make any money from your own "donation", but because it shows passers-by what the arrangement is, and adds an element of social pressure ("Somebody donated, so I should too!"). I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic…

When you look at the book reviews on amazon it really looks like amazon doesn't care about integrity in the review system.

For example if you search for 'learn java', there's a total joke of a book at the top with torrent of fake 5 star reviews.

The first one I read even calls Java, 'the javascript' at one point.

It's an insult to decent authors and to the people who go to the trouble to write reviews that amazon allow this

Edit: I just realised why I found the names of the editor and illustrator familiar!

Ruby C. Perl and Ada R Swift

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#167

Post by kafkaesque »

barking wrote: post #166
wanderfowl wrote: post #70

If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot" by throwing a few dollars and some change into the case. Not because you make any money from your own "donation", but because it shows passers-by what the arrangement is, and adds an element of social pressure ("Somebody donated, so I should too!"). I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic…

When you look at the book reviews on amazon it really looks like amazon doesn't care about integrity in the review system. For example if you search for 'learn java', there's a total joke of a book at the top with torrent of fake 5 star reviews. The first one I read even calls Java, 'the javascript' at one point. It's an insult to decent authors and to the people who go to the trouble to write reviews that amazon all…

I stumbled upon a book by James Franco on Amazon.com a long time ago, and it had a 4-star review on the search page and on the product page.

I thought this was bizarre, because I just happened to have read reviews of it on literary and nonliterary sites giving it extremely poor reviews.

I clicked on "See all # customer reviews" on the Amazon page and the average rating on top immediately went down to 2 stars.

I thought this was a glitch, so I tried to access the product/book page a different way. The same thing happened to all of them.

There were always the same amount of reviews, as well.

About 6 months later I looked up the book again, and the "mistake" was gone. But I had taken a screenshot of it the first time, and there was only two more reviews. The 4-star average appeared on every page.

I look for it now, and it is back at 2 stars like it always was. The book in question is Actors Anonymous.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#168

Post by ohashi »

puranjay wrote: post #80
wanderfowl wrote: post #70

If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot" by throwing a few dollars and some change into the case. Not because you make any money from your own "donation", but because it shows passers-by what the arrangement is, and adds an element of social pressure ("Somebody donated, so I should too!"). I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic…

I tried this with a blog I used to run. Back when RSS subsriber count actually mattered, I faked the subscribe button to show that I had 15,984 subscribers instead of 134. I would get just 1 subscriber every day earlier. After the change, I started getting 3 a day with the same traffic.

When I was working on developing a site, before it had its own domain setup, I used FB like code for another domain just so it would work. It was a popular domain with tens of thousands of likes. I didn't change it right away while I got the site up, one of the early testers was super impressed how many likes my site had though. Despite being connected to a completely different domain. It was social proof that was never actually checked. I updated to my own domain and nobody has ever cared since, sadly.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#169

Post by hienyimba »

collyw wrote: post #153
pyre wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same thing as posting a "tear off this phone number" page on a bulletin board. You always tear off a tab or two when you first post it, to make it look like people have shown interest.

That must depend on what you are advertising. Looking for cheap appartmnts near a university, I would always go for the ones that didn't have lots of numbers taken, as it meant there was more chance I would be first to get it.

which site do u use for your search?

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#170

Post by pwillia7 »

irq-1 wrote: post #150
roymurdock wrote: post #131

Yelp was the only company that caught us, hiding both of the reviews I bought behind their “not recommended” click wall and not counting them in F.A.K.E.’s rating. It has software that screens out suspicious reviews, not including them in a company’s star-rating. If they see too many of them, they will penalize a business’s page, putting a “consumer alert” on the profile for 90 days warning visitors that they think t…

I draw the exact opposite conclusion: Yelp is selling reviews and need to control their product. Twitter and Facebook aren't selling followers or friends, so they fight fakes... but not too hard, because that isn't their product. Isn't the conventional wisdom that Yelp is a protection racket?

Exactly my thoughts. It's becoming more and more clear that Yelp pretty much extorts businesses to upgrade or they surface negative reviews at the top of the page. Since a typical person will read 2-3 reviews this can be pretty impactful.

I also recently heard it alleged that they submitted fake reviews when someone wouldn't upgrade, but that was the first time I had seen that come up.

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