Fraudulent reviews on tripadvisor, twitter etc

[Deleted User]

Surely this is fraudulent? Can anything be done about it apart from reporting to tripadvisor etc.

Wonder if trading standards would be interested even?

dacouch

It's specifically against the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations.

"18. A wolf in sheep’s clothing
Falsely claiming or creating the impression that the
trader is not acting for purposes relating to his/her trade,
business, craft or profession, or falsely representing
oneself as a consumer"

http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/business_leaflets/cpregs/oft979.pdf

Report it to the traders local Tradinfg Standards, they tend to check IP addresses etc. Some are very proactive on this set of laws as they're fairly new.

My favourite are webuyanycar http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews169436.html

or I noticed this one recently see if you can spot the same mistake they make in a lot of the five star reviews, the rest of the five start reviews have a very similar style of writing but do not make the same unusual error.

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews259997.html#Reviews

mo786uk

Yes it is against the law but the 2 main problems with trying to deal with this type of stuff is that it happens A LOT.

Secondly, assuming the websites mentioned even release information about who pout up the review there may not be enough information to trace the person behind it.

If the site is based in the USA - such as twitter - you can forget it. They wont release data about their users unless its a serious issue.

[Deleted User]

In this case, there's a review on tripadvisor for a restaurant made by someone implying they are just a customer and have just 'discovered' this restaurant. The user name is not a common one.

If you then look at the twitter user with the exact same name, they are listed on their profile as the manager of the said restaurant.

I have screenshots and its easily verifiable.

I'm not going to inform the restaurant yet because they'll just delete the review sharpish I guess.

dacouch

Just report it along with any evidence to their local Trading Standards and let them sort it out

mo786uk

Based on what you have said it soudnsl ike there might be enough to 'have a word' but I doubt there is enough to prosecute unless you can definitley link the person who put the review up to the Twitter suer. Assumig the Twitter user is genuinley the restaurant manager and he admits it then you would need to show a link between both accounts. You could perhaps do that by a common IP address or email adress but that would rely on TA releasing the data.

The courts wont accept the evidence you have to a criminal standard to convict - it woudl still require a lot more work.

[Deleted User]

mo786uk wrote: »

Based on what you have said it soudnsl ike there might be enough to 'have a word' but I doubt there is enough to prosecute unless you can definitley link the person who put the review up to the Twitter suer. Assumig the Twitter user is genuinley the restaurant manager and he admits it then you would need to show a link between both accounts. You could perhaps do that by a common IP address or email adress but that would rely on TA releasing the data.

The courts wont accept the evidence you have to a criminal standard to convict - it woudl still require a lot more work.

Yeh. twitter user is deffo the manager - its says on his profile lol.

See what you mean though. Even though its a big co-incidence it COULD be a different person in theory. What are the odds though? LOL

mo786uk

One of his arguments could be that someone made that TA review to stitch him up - it would then be for the authorities to prove otherwise -so therefore they would have to go through the rigmarole of gettthing the data from TA.

patman99

It's not unknown for hotels, guest houses etc to employ people to post positive reviews in various names on TA in order to push negative reviews off the page.

[Deleted User]

mo786uk wrote: »

One of his arguments could be that someone made that TA review to stitch him up - it would then be for the authorities to prove otherwise -so therefore they would have to go through the rigmarole of gettthing the data from TA.

Good point. Could have been I guess. I think not though.

[Deleted User]

patman99 wrote: »

It's not unknown for hotels, guest houses etc to employ people to post positive reviews in various names on TA in order to push negative reviews off the page.

Just shows how dull they are though using the same username on tripadvisor as on twitter. All they have to do is use a different name and no-one would ever know.

Same thing on twitter. This guy used his proper name on twitter and he was bigging up this restaurant. A simple search on linked in showed that he was marketing manager for the parent company. Not clever.