Fake Reviewers Snared in NY Attorney General Yogurt Sting
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So what should they do about it? It's a matter of fraud, it just happens to take place online, and probably in more places than just yelp.com. Since it's fraud, they have an obligation to investigate and prosecute it, and a sting operation like this is probably one of the most effective means of doing so.
This is New York saying they care about their businesses, and that they're willing to take action to protect them. I mean, would you want to open a yogurt shop in New York if you knew it'd have to shut down in less than a year because of a bunch of false negative reviews online? What would be the potential economic impact of that hostile sort of environment?
There is a reason that 100% of these cases were settled....these cases would have been laughed out of a courtroom on constitutional grounds. Personally, I would have forced them to take it to court, but most businesses don't want the headache.
They set up a fake shop, didn't you read the article?
The government.
> Reviews are subjective.
That doesn't mean that they aren't fraudulent in how they portray, among other things, their provenance. (It also doesn't mean they aren't false in how they portray facts; the fact that some parts of reviews, such as ratings, are subjective doesn't mean that they don't include fact claims which are objectively true or false.)
> There is a reason that these cases were settled
Yeah, because the people on the receiving side considered that their probability of winning at trial and getting off with no penalty did not outweigh the cost of trial plus (probability of a penalty being imposed) × (the likely cost of any imposed penalty).
> had a single one of these actually been brought into a courtroom, the case would have been laughed out of it on constitutional grounds.
Were that the case, that would have been a major disincentive for the targets to settle.
That's a non-sequitur, since neither US law nor the criteria on which opinions were based were the basis for the case. New York Law on deceptive business practices and false advertising was the basis.
...it would be completely irrelevant to this case, which isn't about criteria on which shared opinions are based. As I said the last time you raised this red herring. Its based on New York law about deceptive business practices and false advertising, not anything about third-party independent reviews and the criteria on which they are based.
On the other hand the FTC has oversight on this, and there are already existing rules in place. These companies are hardly limited in their exposure or liability from one side.
The FTC has pretty wide purview as to what it wants to do, and the powers that go with it. They can take all of your money, bar you from life from a particular industry,and if you pretend you are broke when your not put you in jail.
As far as US case law goes, yes the government can go after you for making up stuff about a commercial action.
Isn't really indicative of what happened, since the range of individual settlement amounts was from $2,500 to "just under $100,000". And, of course, the main thrust isn't the monetary settlements, its the Assurances of Discontinuance that are part of the settlement, which are themselves enforceable.
> On the other hand the FTC has oversight on this
Only when interstate commerce is involved, and even then it is by design not exclusive of state oversight or individual consumer remedies.
> and there are already existing rules in place.
This action was enforcement action under the existing rules.
But suppose you open a legitimate yogurt shop in Brooklyn, and the competing yogurt shop down the street hires one of those shady Bangladeshi outfits to post a bunch of positive reviews of your business, then rats you out to the AG. The AG is going to come down on you pretty hard, and you're fined, and you're out of business. Mission accomplished.
In other words, be careful what you wish for. This is not an enforceable kind of law.
New York spends a lot of time and money on rather esoteric cases like this when there's plenty of good old fashioned street crimes they could be putting their resources into instead: muggings, gang-related activities, car theft, things that everyone living and working in NYC has to deal with every day of the year.
Even that isn't necessarily the case. If someone likes the name, location, or nature of the business, as long as they don't say that they visited or had an experience there, no one can say that a positive review of even a fictional business is bogus if the reviewer has a good faith belief that the business exists. In fact it could be argued that the reviewers in this case relied upon fraudulent representations made by the investigators that the business existed and was worthy of positive reviews, and are therefore not liable. It's such a subjective issue, and that of course is why these accusations were settled far outside of a courtroom.
Please, we've been assured that this will be the first expansion of police powers into new, unfamiliar domains that doesn't have "unintended" consequences.
Not exactly. It was zero difficulty in determining the SEO companies that were in the business of providing fake reviews. They didn't set up a fake yogurt shop and wait for people to post reviews and then pounce on the reviewers, they set up a fake yogurt shop, and then solicited help in dealing with "negative reviews" from SEO companies, and the help they were offered by some of these companies was in the form of creating fake positive reviews.
A number of the comments on the thread act is if the AG was targeting individual independent reviewers (whether the reviews were fake or otherwise), when in actual fact were targetting two groups of companies:
1. Businesses which were using fake reviews and/or non-disclosed compensated reviews (whether provided by compensated consumers, in-house employees, or outside companies), and
2. Businesses which were providing fake reviews for money.
[ ] muggings
[ ] gang-related activities
[ ] car theft
[X] false restaurant reviews[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_stop-and-frisk_pr...
Also, it is usually a mistake to assume that the U.S. legal system is fair and rational. If the A.G. decides to go after you, you will be facing the fight of your life. Recall that kid who committed suicide after that Massachusetts D.A. threatened him with 35 years of imprisonment over cracking a bunch of scholarly paywalls. Not fair, not rational, not even civilized in my opinion.
- You can frequently find fraudulent positive product reviews on amazon; there is a community that writes satirical reviews for fun. I really don't like the principle that doing something for your own personal amusement is fine, but doing it for profit is illegal. (Yes, I'm aware that this principle is deeply embedded in US law. I just hate it. I also hate the similar principle of "X shall be legal if you are a good person, but illegal if you are an evil person".)
- Many, many comments in this thread (like yours!) are defending the idea of punishing false negative reviews. False negative reviews are not even mentioned in the article. Would you want to open a yogurt shop if you knew you'd have to deal with other yogurt shops getting positive reviews online?
- People seem to like thinking of false reviews as "fraud". "Fraud" doesn't mean lying. Since the people hypothetically making false statements aren't actually getting any money from the people they're making false statements to, and aren't even targeting any identifiable person, a fraud charge might be difficult to stick. (Or it might not; wire fraud is notorious for its applicability to anyone and everyone.)
- Suppose I take money to write a positive review of a yogurt shop desiring the same. I write "Of all the yogurt shops in <area>, this one is my favorite. The food is everything I expect and I have a great relationship with the people there. Highly recommended." It's intentionally misleading, in that I like them because they pay me to like them, but it is punctiliously honest. Under what grounds should that be punishable?
To make a bad pun, it's not free speech if you have to be paid for it. The state will go after those who pay or receive money for what they say.
But, I guess it's no different than the government regulating anonymous online speech about stocks.
The medium doesn't exempt people from those laws.
Why? I mean, in which of the cases where they were specifically treated as "advertisement" were the facts of case such that the postings should not have been viewed as an advertisement?
Why, particularly, would any of these facts make an advertisement any less an advertisement, or any less subject to any regulation that applies to advertisement generally?
1. The fact that the source is concealed ("anonymous postings")
2. The fact that it is published via a privately owned channel ("private")
3. The fact that it is published on the web ("website")
[0] Or rather, New York State businesses themselves committing fraud (if they are the ones writing fake positive reviews about themselves)
(Edited to reflect argumentum's reply),
If McDonalds pays a company to post a review posing as a customer that says Burger King served them horse meat, how is that any different?
Edit to reflect responder: I do get the point.
And false advertising (and deceptive business practices) were the actual charges.
A) A company posts fake reviews about itself, through whatever means. Consumers get a false representation of the business. The company and its associates are the bad guys, Yelp is the good guy.
B) Yelp's filters hide most positive reviews about a company, leaving only negative reviews. All reviews are legitimate. Consumers get an equally false impression of the business. Yelp is the bad guy.
Why is A) illegal and deserving of state interference, but B) is totally legal and continues today?
It isn't. It's going into catching people violating various criminal laws against fraud. That stopping such people happens to help Yelp is a side-effect.
I guess you could argue like a racketeering effect-- who is guilty of murder, the man who pulls the trigger or the mafia boss who orders the hit? (Spoiler: both).
In fact, I'd love to see a State Attorney General use RICO to target not just a group of reviewers who are defrauding businesses, but the entire supply chain by which they get their targets and get paid for their illegal behavior.
And to use RICO to go after them is really goddamn scary. RICO act specifically incurred to run-arounds on due process that were designed to go after organized crime. the expansion of that to terrorists essentially constituted the more worrisome aspects of the PATRIOT act.
"fraud is intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual;" Not a legal definition, but a good enough definition for now.
I think it's a decent use of taxpayer money to help combat the defrauding of businesses in the area.
If they were printing these fake derogatory reviews in local newspapers or on local TV, would your opinion of the fraud change?
I can put up a fake review, but if it's with the intent to harm, it's fraudulent.
Now what do we do about fake reviews that are puff pieces intended to goose ratings?
One is obviously lousy to the business. The other, just SEO.
The other side of the coin is that from the perspective of the victimized businesses, fake reviews are equivalent to any other form of organized crime. Same effect, in that the business (metaphorically) burns down if you don't pay off any of the numerous entitles laying claim to your customers' mindshare... entities among whom Yelp itself is the least shady. There's got to be some way to stop this behavior before we all live and work under the online version of the Russian mafia.
After all, I could write algorithms that used more and more information to determine criminality.
I'm pretty sure they do credit checks and run my license.
You would have to insure your cars against theft. If you get robbed a lot, your insurance company would raise your premium.
it already works like your hypothetical scenario, so what's your point?
edit: an analogy from your point to what happened would be the government setting up a fake car rental and calling up thieves to agree to rent and steal their cars.