Disturbing proof the online review that made you book your holiday may be FAKE

HAVING spent 25 years ensuring his restaurant was regarded as one of the best Indians in Oxford, Aziz Rahman was understandably proud of its reputation. So when he learned someone had described the establishment as serving ‘tasteless food’ in a ‘cold’ atmosphere, he was determined to get to the bottom of the complaint.

And he wasn’t alone. Because, as it transpired, the same mystery ‘diner’ had bones to pick with no fewer than four other curry houses in the city.

In reviews posted online, all were lambasted for their bog- standard biryanis and sloppy service and given one star out of a possible five on influential travel website TripAdvisor.

Knowing how important good customer ratings are to attracting business, Mr Rahman, who runs the Aziz restaurant with his son Abdul, was immediately suspicious. Not only were all the reviews posted on the same day in August but all also recommended a rival establishment as better.

Complaints were lodged with TripAdvisor who, after an investigation, pulled the reviews.

But Mr Rahman, 50, remains unhappy. He says he does not blame the rival restaurant for what happened (it insists it had nothing to do with the posts) — but he is critical of TripAdvisor for allowing such blatantly false reviews to be posted in the first place.

‘Like all restaurants, we have become more reliant on these reviews than ever,’ said Mr Rahman. ‘In a city like Oxford that has lots of tourists, people want to find a good place to eat. They rely on these reviews and their ratings. But there is no accountability for anyone making these reports. They could be anyone — whether they have dined with you or not. It is a huge problem.’

And it is a problem that touches just about every aspect of modern life. Today, log on to the internet and it is possible to find reviews for everything from hotels to hospitals, from tradesmen to teachers.

Websites invite members of the public to submit their opinions and their ratings, which can then be viewed by other potential customers.

And, make no mistake, their influence is enormous. Every year a staggering £23 billion of UK consumer spending is influenced by online reviews, according to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the independent nonministerial department whose aim is to promote competition for the benefit of consumers.

Half of all adults in the UK — some 25 million people — use them. The younger the person, the more important the reviews are to their buying decisions. Furthermore, reviews directly affect where a business will be listed on search engines like Google. Put simply, the more reviews there are, the higher up it will appear.

People trust the reviews because they believe they are unbiased and have been written by ordinary consumers like themselves. While that is true for the majority, there is growing evidence that individuals and companies are cheating the system — upping their ratings by posting positive reviews for themselves or damaging the reputations’ of rivals with negative ones.

And, as the Mail reveals today, an entire industry has grown up dedicated to generating bogus reviews for cash. ‘If you want to give a good impression or mislead consumers into trusting you, the best way to do it is to fake online reviews,’ says Chris Emmins, co-founder of reputation management company KwikChex.

‘People want to believe these online reviews come from genuine people but often they are not. In fact they enable some companies to defraud consumers — there is no question about it.’

To discover just how prevalent the problem has become, I visited a website called Fiverr on which freelance writers, graphic artists and computer programmers from around the world bid for work.

On it, I posted the following request: ‘I’m about to start marketing a holiday cottage in Scotland and want to get some good reviews on leading holiday sites — need reviews and advice on how best to do this.’

Within an hour, I had received more than 20 replies — the cheapest offering a fake review for just £3.50. But what exactly would I get for this?

One of those who answered, an American woman

‘It is a huge problem. There is simply no accountability’

in her 30s who described herself as a writer and ‘stay-at-home-mom’, explained: ‘I would love to leave a positive review of your cottage. I will leave it on TripAdvisor or whichever site you think is best.’

I asked her how it would work. Given that she wouldn’t ever actually go to the cottage, should I should send her photos of the property and a description?

‘ I wouldn’t do pictures,’ she replied. ‘Most of the time people write reviews they don’t have photos handy so I think it would look fake. That said, if you want me to use pictures I will. The best way to do it is for you to write exactly what you want the review to say.

‘I will post it from an aged TripAdvisor account, one that has previous reviews on it, and it will go up and stick with no problems at all.

‘Accept the offer I sent you, send me the text of the review and I will get it posted. TripAdvisor can take up to 24 hours to list a review. Once it is on their site, I send you a screenshot and close out the gig.’

I asked if she had done it before to which she replied: ‘ Yes, I’ve done i t several t i mes before. Yesterday I did one in fact. Positive reviews always work.’

Another offer comes from a writer called Rob, who suggests leaving a review on another well-known site used to advertise self-catering properties in the UK. ‘I am happy to leave reviews on as many different platforms as I can for you,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve been to Scotland too, so I can speak from experience!’

According to industry experts, the market for fake reviews is booming. Across the world — India and I ndonesia are particular hotspots — companies have been set up to churn out fake reviews on demand by the thousands.

These can be used to help propel firms to the top of search engines, attack rivals or simply drown out genuine, bad reviews.

Mr Emmins says the latter tactic is often employed in places such as the Dominican Republic, where a hotel that has been hit by a food poisoning outbreak may seek to counter the potential impact on bookings.

‘You will see many hotels there have an extraordinarily high number of reviews,’ he says. ‘You will also be able to see certain patterns — intense posting of good reviews following reviews claiming food poisoning.’

Many of these reviews, he says, will be by one-time-only posters.

Online, customer- generated ratings also have a direct impact on what a hotel or restaurant can charge. A 2011 Harvard Business School study found that when restaurants increased their ranking by one star on leading customer review site Yelp, revenue increased between five and nine per cent.

And a Cornell University study determined that increasing review scores by one point (on a five point scale) allowed hotels to increase prices 11.2 per cent and still maintain occupancy levels.

The phenomenon of paid-for, fake reviews is something James Lewis, marketing director of London restaurant Gauthier Soho, knows only too well.

‘What these people do is contact you and say that it will cost £3 per review,’ he says. ‘They then suggest we should do a contract of maybe 50 reviews over a year and that they will make sure those reviews will pop up over the course of that year from different accounts.

‘We have a restaurant in Bangkok and they receive the same offers — it is a global thing. In the modern world you cannot ignore online reviews — it is the biggest change that there has been in the last ten years in restaurant marketing. But the more you look under the skin of it, the more worrying it is.’

Of course, leading review websites insist they are doing everything they can to weed out fake reviews.

A spokeswoman for Yelp said all submissions are analysed using specialist software designed to identify potentially fake reviews.

She said: ‘Ultimately, we are confident the software is doing its job because around 150 million users keep returning to Yelp for their next tip. They are therefore finding their business experience more or less matched what they read on Yelp.’

As for TripAdvisor, they tell me they aggressively pursue individuals and companies who attempt this type of ‘organised fraud’.

In the first half of 2015 they claim to have halted the activities of 29 such ‘optimisation’ companies and warn they also act against any businesses who use their services to deceive their customers.

‘We have a team of over 300 content specialists using sophisticated tools and techniques, including best practices from industries such as banking, to catch fraud,’ spokesman James Kay tells me.

‘ Our users, t oo, can r eport suspicious activity to us. Between our teams, our tools and our community, we are very effective at maintaining the integrity of the reviews on TripAdvisor.’

Amazon, meanwhile, has resorted to legal action. In April it launched proceedings in the American courts against four websites it claims have been selling bogus four, and fivestar product reviews.

The trouble is keeping up with the fakers. In order to give themselves credibility, they often set up false profiles and accounts using names and photographs harvested from real people’s Facebook pages.

Last week an investigation by The Sunday Times i nto how f aked reviews could be used to push a book up Amazon’s top ten lists, found one reviewer who had posted reviews using the identities of a number of teenage British girls, none of whom were aware of what was going on. (The idea being that if Amazon were to investigate the accounts, they would find them linked to real people and not investigate further.)

Earlier this year, a BBC investigation found that a review singing the praises of a British payday loan site had been posted in the name of an American woman killed in a car crash. Sickeningly, the profile photograph accompanying it had been taken from her memorial website.

With this background, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that the authorities are starting to take an interest in the manipulation of reviews and the impact it is having on consumer choice.

In 2013, 19 companies were caught writing fake reviews in a sting by New York’s attorney general Eric Schneiderman. He described them as being the ‘21st century’s version of false advertising’.

But much closer to home is the inquiry that was launched in June by the Competition and Markets Authority.

It is concerned consumers here are being deliberately misled by fake website reviews and bogus paid-for endorsements.

While it has not named the companies at the centre of its investigation, it will focus on businesses writing or commissioning positive reviews about themselves to boost their ratings on review sites.

It will also investigate firms writing

They steal the identities of of the dead ‘You have no idea if they are telling

the truth’

or commissioning negative reviews about rivals, which, as we have seen, is a particular problem in the hotel and restaurant trade.

Some sites also stand accused of ‘cherry-picking’ positive reviews, or suppressing negative reviews without declaring this policy. The watchdog warned these scams may breach t he Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations Act, and leave firms open to legal action and fines.

T hey may al s o break UK Advertising Codes, which are policed by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

‘Millions of people look at online reviews and endorsements before making decisions such as where to stay on holiday, or which plumber to use,’ said CMA spokeswoman Nisha Arora.

‘We found that consumers find them valuable, but have also heard about some practices that may be unlawful. We are committed to ensuring that trust is maintained, and will take enforcement action where necessary to tackle unlawful practices.’

As well as legal action to act as a deterrent, there are those who believe that more should be done by the review companies to authenticate the identity of those leaving reviews.

In Oxford, Mr Rahman believes one way to do this would be to insist that anyone writing a review also posts an image or scan of their receipt as proof.

This way only those who have sampled the meal they are commenting on or the product they are reviewing, would be able to do so. It would also allow the business about whom they complained to have some point of reference against which to check their complaint.

‘At the moment you have no idea if that person is telling the truth,’ he said. ‘Why even give the opportunity for an individual to create this sort of damage?’

TripAdvisor says they have considered — and rejected — such verification options.

‘We have elected to use our current model for one simple reason: the volume of opinions provides the most in-depth coverage of consumer experience, and is the model consumers prefer,’ said the spokesman.

They may prefer it at the moment. But if trust continues to erode in the way things are being done currently, that may not be the case much longer.