Wonga/Payday Express - Why don't they play ball?

asbokid

RobertoMoir wrote: »

asbokid wrote: »

maybe we can look at the standard techniques used by corporate propagandists, especially those who work covertly on internet forums like this one.

In the case of propagandists for the PDL industry, these operatives assume a variety of personas..

The propagandist can pose as

• a would-be borrower,
• an existing borrower-in-distress,
• an ostensibly well-meaning "advice-giver" to the above

shills for the "other side"

Indeed.

TripAdvisor has just been hauled over the coals by the Advertising Standards Authority because of the hordes of shills who infest its website. [1] [2]

The TripAdvisor website and its reputation is collapsing under the heap of bogus "reviews" posted about hotels and restaurants.

These fake reviews take two forms. Either they are fawning false reviews in praise of a business, or else malicious in criticism, to divert trade to rivals.

And those are shills working in the comparatively reputable hospitality industry!

We really shouldn't doubt that the scummy loanshark industry uses covert shills to work our consumer finance forums!

In her article in CSM of August last, Husna Haq posed the question: "Are we awash in a sea of fabricated online reviews?" [3]

The answer to the question is: of course.

Haq writes that "after determining that most people can’t tell the fakes from the bona fides, a team of Cornell University researchers developed an algorithm to detect fake reviews which they called "Deceptive Opinion Spam"..

"deceptive opinion spammer" ..
"shill" ...
"covert online propagandist" ..
"online reputation management consultant" ..
"fake review optimizer" ...
"online perception management operative" ..

What's in a name? They are but heads of the same Hydra beast.

The Cornell paper is entitled “Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam". The paper can be downloaded from [4]. The abstract is copied below:

ABSTRACT:

Consumers increasingly go online to rate, review and research products (Jansen, 2010; Litvin et al., 2008). Consequently, websites containing these reviews are becoming targets of opinion spam. While recent work has focused primarily on manually identifiable instances of opinion spam, in this work we study deceptive opinion spam—fictitious opinions that have been deliberately written to sound authentic. Integrating work from psychology and computational linguistics, we develop and compare three approaches to detecting deceptive opinion spam, and ultimately develop a classifier that is nearly 90% accurate on our gold-standard opinion spam dataset.

Wonga.Com has just announced that it is to double its £8m annual spend on propaganda.

The rogue lender boasts that its cash injection will specifically target social networking sites, and other online forums.

What price for a spattering of wonga shills to work the major consumer finance fora?!

£8 million quid buys a very big dollop of minimum wage shills @ £6.08 an hour...

Shill talk comes cheap!

[1] http://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-action/Adjudications/2012/2/TripAdvisor-LLC/SHP_ADJ_166867.aspx
[2] http://www.argophilia.com/news/tripadvisors-fake-reviews/23805/
[3] http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2011/0823/Are-we-awash-in-a-sea-of-fabricated-reviews
[4] http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~ychoi/Papers/acl11_deception.pdf

RobertoMoir

asbokid wrote: »

{A collection of non-sequiturs and twaddle, which I've snipped}

With the greatest of respect, thinking that was an appropriate response to anything here, let alone the taken out of context snippet of my reply that you chose to quote makes you either a troll or someone who should be talking to their doctor about the state of their mental health.

For once, I find myself hoping that someone really is just a troll. For your own sake.

MonkeyMad

Apples, you obviously need to go an a retraining course since in a previous post you told someone to move all their banking before defaulting a PDL to avoid being cleaned out. You clearly weren't listening when Wonga HQ Training Dept told to screw these guys for as much money as possible. Unless this is a double or even triple bluff


Where's my tin foil hat......

Peelerfart

Hang on I've thought of another one www.loans4nobbs.com" get loads of takers for that one

MonkeyMad

asbokid wrote: »

ABSTRACT:

Consumers increasingly go online to rate, review and research products (Jansen, 2010; Litvin et al., 2008). Consequently, websites containing these reviews are becoming targets of opinion spam. While recent work has focused primarily on manually identifiable instances of opinion spam, in this work we study deceptive opinion spam—fictitious opinions that have been deliberately written to sound authentic. Integrating work from psychology and computational linguistics, we develop and compare three approaches to detecting deceptive opinion spam, and ultimately develop a classifier that is nearly 90% accurate on our gold-standard opinion spam dataset.

So the team paid to have these fake opinions (their gold standard dataset) made up as part of the research - so what? They then go on to prove that they have a method to detect these false review - good for them. Have you applied these methods to this website?

How does this sound:
Lots of computers are infected with a computer virus

Company A pays random coders to write lots of mutations of a computer virus similar to the original.

Company A has software that can detect these to some degree of accuracy.
A casual reader declares this research proves the internet is full of computer viruses (despite conclusion of Company A research team being that they have only created a method of detecting a type of computer virus).

Rest of world slaps forehead.

Labmanager

When asbokid says that 13/16 out of 50 USA States is a majority, all else he says loses credibility I suggest.

malkyh

Where did you copy and paste that from? Maybe if you used the same font type and size as the rest of the posts it wouldn't be so obvious.

Apples2

Big_Brothers wrote: »

If you have problems keeping up with your payments, please do :spam: forums

Aside from the fact that phone number goes straight to a tacky ripoff loan broker you mean??

:spam: button clicked, GET 'ORF OUR LAND YA FUD!!

An 0161 code is the first sign you are going to be scammed, Manchester/Stockport is the epicenter of financial scammers.