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Comment by rsstack | Hacker News Reader

I am an engineer, not a lawyer, but I expect that from a criminal perspective it doesn't count as fraud because it isn't material information, and the consumer rights differ vastly between countries and probably don't cover "dishonest but immaterial information" - there weren't lies on the price, on availability, etc.

If a company asks me to implement something I believe is illegal I ask for clarifications from a lawyer. Since I wasn't asked to implement this in a "wrong" way, I never looked into it further.

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I’m not a lawyer either. I was thinking that this may fall under false advertising [0]. That is, claiming N people are interested in the product/service while that information is clearly made up.

To be clear, I’m referring to an implementation that just uses a number that looks good, disconnected from any sort of metrics.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising

False advertising is narrower than some people would like it to be.

Indeed it's both not ethical not legal in most parts of the world.

My educated guess it that only reason it happens anywhere at all - is within "smaller" websites/companies which:

a) don't know better because they are mostly just tech people that didn't heave to deal with big company bureaucracy, they have no legal/ethics team - or (hopefully not big chunk) they do know it's not legal, but count on ...

b) they are small enough that no one bothers to deal with until amount of money company is making suddenly makes it go over whatever amount makes it worth the effort

> it isn't material information

Why not?

The SEC doesn't take that attitude when they catch people artificially manipulating the frequency at which something is trading.

Shirts aren't securities :)

Why should the law be any different? Selling cheap products doesn't entitle you to lie, or otherwise break the law, to close the sale. Counterfeit goods are taken seriously by the law despite being cheap.

In the case of holiday and hotel websites, they're selling expensive packages.

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