
A Peddler of Fake Reviews on TripAdvisor Gets Jail Time - elorant
https://skift.com/2018/09/12/fake-reviews-tripadvisor-jail-italy/
======
ilamont
_TripAdvisor hopes that jail time will scare off the dishonest folks creating
fake reviews. We hope so, too._

That's the take of the Skift travel blog? No description in the article about
the law that was broken and whether or not it can be applied to violators
outside of Italy.

And, honestly, if peddlers of fake reviews are criminally liable and can be
sentenced to jail then there's a problem with the law. TripAdvisor, Amazon,
Apple, and Google definitely need to boost the disincentives for posting fake
reviews, but referring suspected offenders for criminal prosecution is over
the top unless fraud or other serious crimes are involved.

~~~
djrogers
> unless fraud or other serious crimes are involved

Fraud: wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or
personal gain

Pretending to be someone you're not to _make money by lying_ is fraud, plain
and simple.

~~~
ilamont
So every fake review is to be treated as a case of full-on criminal fraud?

These cases need to be pursued in civil court, if at all. A better approach is
for TripAdvisor, Amazon, et al is A) set up a better system to positively
identify fake reviews and B) to ban both the providers and purchasers of fake
reviews, including owners, senior executives, and colluding staff. If the
disincentives are strong enough and consistently and fairly enforced a lot of
bad actors will be cleared out in short order and responsible companies won't
go near this stuff.

~~~
toss1
The person was making a business of it, it was not just a casual, occasional
lie.

This is systemically poisoning the well of public trust upon which society
relies to function.

We only have a prosperous society because we have widespread trustworthyness.

You propose that breaking it down is meaningless.

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andretti1977
I am italian and i won't ever understand my country! We are years behind other
tech countries (in terms of laws and legislation and business support) and we
are the land of neverending trials and let a lot of crimes be committed
without effective punishment and then an italian court sent to prison somebody
for fake reviews...i'm happy they let justice do its work in this case, simply
it seems so unusual and a little bit exaggerated since others crimes aren't
punished with the same severity

~~~
presscast
Londoner here -- I see _a lot_ of your compatriots working on awesome tech
products. To boot, they all seem to be TechItalia graduates, so it seems like
Italy has a serious brain-drain problem :/

~~~
marcyb5st
I am one of these "escaped brains". The explanation is extremely simple. In my
case, after finishing Uni (degree in CS), I applied for few companies in my
area, near Verona which is a wealthy part of Italy.

The best salary I managed to bargain was around 1000 euro per month (gross).
This leaves you with a 750 Euro net and basically no benefits. Take away rent,
a little bit of leisure, and transportation costs you basically save nothing.

At that point I said fuck it. I started looking for jobs on the other side of
the Alps and landed a job at Google in Switzerland that pays 10X that. And
yes, Switzerland is crazy expensive, but not 10X Italy!

I miss Italy, but it now became a holiday destination for me.

~~~
ensignavenger
Doe Italy not have a minimum wage, or is it just really low?

~~~
marcyb5st
Some working categories have it, some don't. IT didn't back in 2013, the
period when I decided to pack my stuff and go. Now I believe it has been
incorporated in the metalworker category (see below).

Minimum salary for year 2018/2019 (hourly/monthly)

Clothing and fashion 6,60 € 1.144 € Agricolture 7,13 € 1.235,87 € Tourism 7,17
€ 1.242,80 € Metalworker 7,32 € 1.268,80 € Construction 7,59 € 1.315,60 € Food
industry 8,21 € 1.423,07 € Finance 11,11 € 1.925,73 €

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so_tired
Err..

So yelp/tripa/whatever charges business for positive reviews and improved
placement, but 3rd party frauds go to jail?

I suppose we will get community time for sharing our netflix password next ?

~~~
cschmidt
Disclaimer: I work at TripAdvisor.

Please don't lump TripAdvisor in with Yelp. You can't pay for a positive TA
review, or for more prominent placement of your positive reviews. Our reviews
are just listed in reverse chronological order. You also can't pay to appear
higher on the hotel list of a given city.

~~~
josefresco
"You also can't pay to appear higher on the hotel list of a given city."

This would seem to conflict with your statement:
[https://www.tripadvisor.com/TripAdvisorInsights/w588](https://www.tripadvisor.com/TripAdvisorInsights/w588)

"These ads drive high quality traffic to your business by appearing above
search results"

~~~
cschmidt
Sure, we have sponsored placements in the first slot, which contain the word
"sponsored" next to them. That's an ad, in the same way Google has ads, and it
appears above the list. I'm saying we don't let you pay to change the order of
the list itself, in the same way Google doesn't.

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jrochkind1
I've decided and tried to remember that you pretty much can't trust ANY online
reviews of ANYTHING. The dream of the internet is over.

[https://www.recode.net/2018/3/18/16581030/mattress-
reviews-n...](https://www.recode.net/2018/3/18/16581030/mattress-reviews-
nectar-nest-affiliate-fees-ftc-memoryfoamtalk-casper)

~~~
pythia__
To be able to trust random Internet users was never a good dream because cheap
identity is the Internet's default. (Not necessarily a bad one.) More
surprising than reviews regressing to the mean is that it took them so long.
Why?

~~~
jrochkind1
Agreeing with you, I guess the weird thing is that it WORKED for 20 years or
so!

I'm sure people have written a lot on this. I think some of it is because most
people actually _are_ interested in treating each other respectfully, and the
internet was smaller, with less opportunities for making money (at one point
enforced anti-commercial in fact), and more homogenous (for better or worse).

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kazinator
> _Italian court handed down a nine-month prison sentence to a person who
> wrote fake hotel reviews_

I heard it was reduced on appeal. Now he has to serve a week in prison, and
the remaining four months are public service: he will temporarily join the
cabinet, advising Italy's prime minister. He will receive no salary, just room
and board: for anything else, he will have to leverage his position to hustle
kickbacks.

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jaclaz
The "strange" thing is that seemingly all this happened in June 2018,
according to Trip Advisor themselves (Italian):

[https://www.tripadvisor.it/TripAdvisorInsights/w4237](https://www.tripadvisor.it/TripAdvisorInsights/w4237)

If you search for the "news", each and every italian (and not only) newspaper
has something about it, published in the last 24 hours or so.

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jetti
>“Writing fake reviews has always been fraud, but this is the first time we’ve
seen someone sent to jail as a result,” said Brad Young, vice president,
associate general counsel at TripAdvisor, in a statement.

I don't get this. Writing a fake review doesn't seem like fraud to me. What
seems like fraud is a company passing off a fake review as it is legit. Which
would mean that the company that paid for the fake review should be the one in
legal trouble not the person writing the fake review.

Edit: I should clarify while leaving my original comment up. I phrased this
poorly. What I should say is why is only the company who wrote the reviews
being punished instead of the both the company who wrote the review AND the
company that paid for the fraudulent review in the first place?

~~~
detaro
In addition, maybe. "I only did it for money" isn't really an excuse for the
person actually making the reviews though. They submitted the reviews
pretending they're legit.

~~~
jetti
You're right. I definitely didn't get my thoughts down in a correct manner and
I added an edit. That said, actively paying somebody for a review that is not
legit is definitely fraud as well, yet it doesn't seem like anybody who used
PromoSalento's reviews were fined or jailed.

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stephengillie
Is this peddler part of how "TripAdvisor changed travel"[0]?

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17870480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17870480)

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vaseem
Paid fake news is okay, but not this. Our value system is totally .... up !

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qwerty456127
People who write inadequately negative reviews should be punished too.

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DoctorOetker
From the article:

>The company has said that most attempts at review fraud are committed by a
small minority of hotel and restaurant owners trying to boost their profile
unfairly rather than knock another property.

>Anyone can post a review on TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Minube, whereas a guest
may only post a review of a hotel on online travel agency platforms if the
person actually books at least one night at the hotel through the agency.

>In 2012, TripAdvisor was scolded by a UK watchdog group, the Advertising
Standards Authority, for using promotional wording on its site saying that it
offered “reviews you can trust… from real travellers… and trusted advice from
real travellers.” The group said the company couldn’t back up the claim by
proving that all of the reviews were genuine and from real travelers. However,
strictly speaking, no system, based on verified bookers or not, could meet
that standard.

How valuable is a review? What does it contrast to? Some imaginary _background
or average experience_? It is hard to design a system such that there are no
fake reviews. The fake reviews can take different forms: actual customers who
were "bribed" (or is that just a discount?); paid reviewers did physically
visit but who were bribed, possibly posting under false names, or simply fake
reviews written by people who were never accomodated.

Here is my probably brainfart idea which tries to solve both problems at once:

HostCompare may be implemented centralized or decentralized, so I will
describe the decentralized version, such that a centralized version can cull
away some of the crypto (but then bribing central HostCompare is a
vulnerabillity).

HostCompare: instead of reviews, customers booking accomodation in a city
through hostcompare, will spend half of their visit at one accomodation, and
half at another. The customer can navigate the comparisons between different
places, and for each pair already tested view all the facets for which place A
is better ">" or worse "<" than place B.

In exchange for the tourist traffic forwarded HostCompare demands a certain
percentage of their income. Each host is free to generate its own keypair, and
when the tourist arrives shows his passport/ID/... and the host signs the hash
of: the name of the visitor and the Comparison's unique ID, and publishes it.
This means that you can't create a positive review for your place without also
generating customer traffic to your competition and convincing a tourist to
co-operate. The comparison is only written once the consecutive stay at both
hosts is over.

EDIT: I was going to write my idea more in-depth, including how HostCompare
would use part of the profit to encourage (by making cheaper through discount)
unexplored comparisons. Also finding cycles in the directed graph. Also how a
host bribing a HostCompare tourist would only work if this bribe is offered
indefinitely to HostCompare tourists. Furthermore it is more efficient to
simply list a lower price at HostCompare since then you are paying less
towards HostCommpare. The bribe is effectively a means to be secretly cheaper
than listed. Comparisons are also better than reviews since the host can think
about how to improve the situation, since it is in fact a comparison instead
of a review in vacuum, or a review in comparison with vague memory of travels
past, or a review in comparison with some unformalized expectation.

------
DoctorOetker
TLDR: "Taste can not be argued" but identity can.

------
vectorEQ
rofl. jailed for leaving reviews. how to fill up your prison system and create
messed up mind? just like that!

~~~
djrogers
Based on even a cursory reading of the article, he was jailed for _selling
fake reviews_ \- not leaving them. Profiting from deception is a common line
to draw when defining fraud.

~~~
odyssey7
In addition, these reviews were unambiguously lies rather than puffery; the
author never used the services that were reviewed.

