1.3 million fake comments!

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Of the 30 million reviews on hotels and other tourism services on Tripadvisor, 4.4 percent are fake. Thus, the tourism portal revealed that nearly 1.3 million ratings were fake, if not fraudulent.

Tripadvisor publishes these figures in its latest “Transparency Report” published biennially. Tripadvisor moderators manually reviewed over 2.3 million suspicious reviews for 2022. And 1.3 million of them were finally identified as fake and removed. Paid rating companies are also an issue on the portal. Last year, Tripadvisor deleted 24,521 purchased reviews. More than half of these fake reviews come from review companies based in India, Russia, the US, Turkey, Italy, and Vietnam.

Some fake ratings will be removed automatically. Tripadvisor itself states that 72 percent of fake reviews are deleted before or as soon as they reach the website. Two years ago, this value was still 66 percent.

The above issue does not include entries that have been removed from the platform for violating other rules such as the use of vulgar language or the dissemination of political content and opinions.

Fraud attempts remain stable

For Tripadvisor, cleaning up reviews is a Sisyphus mission. Even as more and more scam attempts are discovered, it is still impossible to get it under control. In 2022 alone, Tripadvisor had to penalize over 33,000 businesses for fraud. Considering the 11 million ranked companies on the platform, that may not seem like much. But the number is steady: Two years ago, Tripadvisor fined 34,605 ​​properties for fraudulent activities.

Also, Tripadvisor does not estimate the number of fake reviews that are not identified as fake.

“Platforms like ours are built on trust. That’s why we’re constantly learning and improving our systems to ensure our community has access to honest and accurate content,” said Becky Foley, Tripadvisor Vice President of Trust and Safety. There are 73 million reviews total on Tripadvisor.

What counts as a fake review?

Anyone who is biased or has no personal experience with the rated company should not vote. This is why paid reviews by review companies are prohibited.

Anyone associated with a rated company—for example, as an owner, employee, or family member—is also not allowed to rate. It’s common for people to glorify their company or deliberately make malicious comments to competitors to unfairly lower their rankings or tarnish the company’s reputation.

Interesting detail: The more people are interested in certain objects or areas, the higher the scam attempts. Tripadvisor proves this with the World Football Cup held in Qatar: The number of scam attempts is higher than ever. But thanks to the 2018 World Cup experience in Russia, Tripadvisor was better prepared.

Source :Blick