The New York Times reports that New York regulators have agreed to allow $350,000 in penalties to be paid by companies that wrote fake positive online reviews for products or services. In some cases the fake reviews are written by the actual companies, while in other cases, the fake reviews are written by reputation enhancement firms.
According to the article, fake reviewers also “went on review sites that criticized their own fake-review operations and wrote fake reviews denying they wrote fake reviews.”
Got that? If so, and you live in Bangladesh or Eastern Europe, someone may pay you $1 to write a fake review, according to the story.
Don’t know how to write a review? The regulators did find some helpful tips that reviewers were using to write fake reviews, including: “Do not make them sound like an advertisement.”
3 Fake Reviews For This Web Site, Inspired By This News Story
1. “***** I consider myself to be a cheese snob, and I can say that Not The Worst News has the best cheese in my neighborhood. Well, technically, I can’t say that to anyone, because I am a snob, and therefore can’t talk to people. I am way tooo good to be typing this review on my gold iPhone 5S, and certainly not being paid a dollar to do this, as I only deal in bills larger than Bangladeshi 100 Taka notes.”
2. “***** I absolutely did not write that fake review of Not The Worst News that everyone is accusing me of writing on Yelp. And I can legally say that, because I hired someone in Slovakia to write it using my account.”
3. “***** I gotta tell you the truth, I don’t even use the internet or know how it works. But then my college roommate, was all like, check this Not The Worst News page out. And now I read it every day, and can’t stop laughing! Or is it crying? I get the two confused, because English is not my first language. Anyway, I definitely recommend everyone bookmark this page, and push a Czech Koruna or two right into the CD-rom drive to electronically send it to the site in appreciation. What, that’s not physically possible? See I was being totally honest when I said I didn’t know how the internet works!”
