The Sunday Times February 13, 2022 13
just as hard to game our systems”. It said
that it had long been a leader in fighting
review fraud online. “With one billion
pieces of review and travel guidance and
over two decades of experience, we’ve
become experts in navigating the
phenomenon of social-media
fraud, and we use the best in
technology and human
moderation practices to
counter bad actors,” it said.
Businesses caught
engaging in unscrupulous
activity on its platform
face sanctions that range
from ranking drops in its
popularity index to badges
on their business listing.
Because buying reviews is
illegal in the UK and many other
countries, those who do so are unable to
go to the authorities to recoup payments.
Since 2010 Tripadvisor has taken action to
remove more than 240 paid-review
companies from its platform that had
attempted to post content.
Could review sites now have grown
too big to be relevant, though? The
26 million reviews uploaded to
Tripadvisor in 2020 equates to one
every 1.2 seconds: eight million hotels,
12 million restaurants and four million
activities, attractions and experiences.
Two thirds of reviewers gave five stars,
but Tripadvisor does not stand by its
users’ opinions. The small print states
that “Tripadvisor... disclaims all liability
for any errors or other inaccuracies
relating to the information and
description of the accommodation,
experiences, air, cruise, restaurant or
any other travel products displayed on
the services (including, without
limitation... reviews and ratings)”.
Caveat emptor, in other words.
In the interests of integrity the
Association of Independent Tour
Operators has its own approach. “We ask
our members to request that clients post
reviews to our website at aito.com,” said
Bharat Gadhoke, head of commercial at
the organisation. “The authenticity of
these reviews is verified by the booking
reference and departure date, in addition
to the client’s name and trip details.”
Acknowledging that he’s fighting a
war that he cannot win, Emmins has
launched veri-good.com, a platform that
will eschew unverifiable posts in favour
of unannounced assessments of the
hospitality businesses signed up to the
service by known and trusted reviewers.
They’re what used to be known as hotel
inspectors, he said. They could catch on.reviews, eight places below the Lulu
International Shopping Mall in Kochi,
India. Booking.com claims 232 million
verified reviews.
Fake reviews are not only used to give
unscrupulous businesses the edge. With
ratings so integral to company
profiles, criminal gangs
running bogus travel agencies
and screen-scraping villa-scam
operations — in which the
contact details
for legitimately advertised
properties are changed to
those operating the scam
— all need a portfolio of
public approvals to gain the
confidence of customers
they can then rip off.
Emmins estimates that tens of
thousands of fake reviews make it onto the
platforms every week.
And it’s not just the overeffusive
we should be wary of, warns Andy Beal,
a reputation and branding consultant.
“Competitors or ex-employees might
leave fake one-star reviews or purchase
a package of negative reviews in an
attempt to attack the reputation of a
product or service,” he says.
So what advice does he have for
review-reliant travellers? “Ignore both
the one-star and the five-star reviews,
especially if they were all published in
a short period of time,” he said. “Instead
read the two, three or four-star reviews,
and pay attention to any comments that
provide personalised criticism or praise.
Generic reviews such as ‘Terrible service,
don’t go there!’ or ‘Amazing trip, you
should book it!’ should be ignored.”
Tripadvisor said it had “invested
decades of time and resources to build
a content-moderation team that has
wins every day” in keeping fraud off its
platform, “but the fraudsters are working2.2m
of the 39 million
reviewssubmitted to
Trustpilot in
2020 were fakeBelow, the
Sagrada Familia
in Barcelona —
Tripadvisor’s
most reviewed
attractionemployed students in Brighton to make
up reviews. They cost £1 each, but the
minimum order was for 5,000. It didn’t sit
well with us because it was all false — but
businesses are being dragged into a dirty
war that didn’t exist before Tripadvisor.”
If they don’t cold-call you, the
fraudsters aren’t hard to track down.
I found reviewr.co.uk via
a Google search for “paid reviews”.
Posing as an individual
working in the hospitality
and travel industry, I
connected via WhatsApp to
a contact in Dhaka. He
offered to post 50 five-star
reviews for about £220,
even sending me samples
of past work.
When I explained that I
needed realistic-looking
hotel reviews, he suggested
that I could write them
myself and send them to him so he could
assign names to each one and upload
them. Could he post these from a British-
based IP address so that Tripadvisor
would believe the reviews to be genuine?
Of course, he replied.
Of the 26 million reviews that were
submitted to Tripadvisor in 2020, nearly
one million were deemed fraudulent.
The platform says that each post goes
through a computerised tracking system
and 3.1 per cent of all reviews in 2020
were automatically rejected, with a
further 5.1 per cent sent to moderators.
The company’s 2021 Transparency
Report states that its systems “prevented
67.1 per cent of all fake review submissions
from ever making it onto the platform”.
This implies that 32.9 per cent slipped
through the net and were only detected
after they had appeared online.
Chris Emmins runs KwikChex, a
reputation-management company
specialising in the detection of fraudulent
reviews. He said that he was often
“stunned” by the simplicity of those
that made it through the checking
processes — and that Tripadvisor,
Google and other online review sites
face a far more sophisticated threat.
“All review sites exaggerate how
effectively they can detect fraud,”
Emmins said, “but it’s not hard for
fraudsters to sidestep the systems. It’s not
just the use of virtual private networks
[VPNs] to disguise IP addresses and the
use of AI-generated copy, it’s also that it’s
much harder to check IP addresses from
mobile uploads.
“The fraudsters — often based in the
Indian subcontinent or
Indonesia — are now using
artificial intelligence to
overcome any written-
language deficiencies. It’s
not expensive for them
because they can use
subscription services to
access cloud-based AI
software, and they can even
use bots to generate copy.
“It’s the same technology
that’s being used to generate
fake news. And the irony now is that some
of their output becomes detectable only
because it’s better articulated than
genuine reviews. In effect we’re catching
them because they’re too good.”
Tripadvisor is the industry leader,
but it’s not alone. The Danish company
Trustpilot reported in 2020 that
2.2 million of the 39 million reviews
submitted to its site in 2020 were fake.
Google began publishing user reviews
in 2007 — its top spot is the Masjid
al-Haram in Mecca, with 333,628
reviews. Buckingham Palace sits at 39th
in the world rankings with 143,901employed students in Brighton to make
hhbh
“All review sites exaggerate how
ff l h d f d91%
of people aged
18 to 34 trustonline reviews as
much as personalrecommendations
The Four Seasons Resort in Peninsula Papagayo, Costa Rica, above and below left
NARISARA NAMI, SITTHIPHONG, ALEXANDER SPATARI/GETTY IMAGES; DON RIDDLE