Comment by Zikes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zikes | Hacker News Reader

Alright, so New York's relevant offices get a lot of complaints of false advertising in various online forums in the form of fake reviews. Obviously this is bad for legitimate businesses in the area, because their reputation could be negatively affected to a fairly significant degree, especially if the practice is allowed to continue.

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?

They set up a straw man so of course any reviews, positive or negative, are going to be bogus.

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.

> They set up a straw man so of course any reviews, positive or negative, are going to be bogus.

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.

In other words, be careful what you wish for.

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.

That's why the AG created the fake yogurt shop. Zero difficultly in determining the fake reviews. I doubt they would take on the case of a single shop's problems.

> That's why the AG created the fake yogurt shop. Zero difficultly in determining the fake reviews.

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.

I have been living in NYC for the past 5 years. These are the things I dealt with:

  [ ] muggings
  [ ] gang-related activities
  [ ] car theft
  [X] false restaurant reviews

Yeah. The government should only look out for spoiled rich white people. There are no other people in NYC, right? Also, New York City is just that little island with the tall buildings, right?

NYC actually has an epidemic of persons unlawfully looking through the pockets of black men and I think that should be attended to before restaurant reviews.

Do you mean law enforcement or muggers?

I believe the comment refers to NYC's Stop and Frisk program[0] which has been ruled unconstitutional by a US district judge, who found that the program unfairly targets African Americans and Latinos.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_stop-and-frisk_pr...

Wrong, because if you were prosecuted they'd have to show that the purchase of the shill reviews came from you. If it turned out that the order was placed from an IP address connected with your competitor down the street - which it would during even a cursory investigation - then it would be your competitor that was in hot water with the law, not you.

Not if they do it in a library or any of hundreds of wifi hotspots around town. They'd have to be idiots to do something like that on their own data connection.

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'd be amazed how many criminals are, in fact, idiots. The brainy supervillian is largely a myth. In any case, it would be up to the prosecutor to prove that you were the origin of the dodgy reviews, not up to you to prove that someone else was. If there was insufficient evidence to identify the author, then you couldn't be successfully prosecuted, and most prosecutors won't waste the resources on a case they clearly can't win.

And if you offer Wi-Fi to your customers? What then? A protracted court case? ;)

Who is the government to say that a particular review isn't authentic? Reviews are subjective. While it is in fact a difficult argument to say that a review for the fake business used in this entrapment operation is authentic, perhaps I love or don't love the name or location of the business, and give it a rating based upon that. Maybe I own a yogurt shop, and automatically hate all of my competitors. No one can tell me that I can't like or dislike any business for any reason, whether I have visited them or not.

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.

> Who is the government to say that a particular review isn't authentic?

They set up a fake shop, didn't you read the article?

Yes....you apparently didn't read my entire comment. "While it is in fact a difficult argument to say that a review for the fake business used in this entrapment operation is authentic, perhaps I love or don't love the name or location of the business, and give it a rating based upon that."

What this shows me is how utterly worthless online reviews are.

It also demonstrates SEO value but it's not representative of all SEO. That same stands for online reviews: many are worthless but some of them are not.

So how can I differentiate between the worthless and non-worthless reviews?

Did you miss the part where they didn't just arrest random people for giving ratings based on the name? They arrested people for offering to give ratings for money.

> Who is the government to say that a particular review isn't authentic?

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.

The cases, like many others brought by overzealous prosecutors, were settled because the state offered settlements at a discount to anticipated defense costs. As to your other arguments, depending on the content of a review, it could be fraudulent. But again, US law doesn't (yet) specify criteria upon which I must base opinions that I choose to share.

> But again, US law doesn't (yet) specify criteria upon which I must base opinions that I choose to share.

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.

If New York has a law that imposes the criteria upon which opinions shared with others must be based (I can pretty much guarantee that they don't), it will be quickly tossed out on constitutional grounds.

> If New York has a law that imposes the criteria upon which opinions shared with others must be based

...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.

$350,000 divided by 19, that is more embarrassing to the NY Attorney General than the companies named.

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.

> $350,000 divided by 19

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.

A few things here bother me:

- 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?

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