Yelp has a wall of shame for businesses caught paying for fake reviews

Yelp is releasing a new index that tracks every U.S establishment it’s ever caught engaging in “suspicious” activity to influence its reviews. The company has made some of this information available in the past. Yelp places temporary alerts on businesses’ pages when it discovers fake reviews, and regularly releases transparency reports detailing its moderation efforts. But the index is the first time the company has offered a single place where users can find a historical record of every business that’s ever been subject to such a warning as well as a current list of businesses with active alerts on their pages .

For Yelp, the index is both its latest move in a long-running war on fake reviews, as well as a nod to a changing regulatory environment in which fake reviews are attracting increasing scrutiny from regulators. The FTC recently proposed a formal ban on fake reviews with penalties of up to $50,000 for businesses caught buying, selling or manipulating online reviews.

Yelp has said it supports such a rule. The company’s head of user operations, Noorie Malik, points out the company has previously worked with the FTC to notify them when it discovers fake reviews and the sometimes complex operations behind them. “We'd love to get to a place where this new index develops into a regular resource for others, whether it's FTC, consumers, regulators or other sites,” Malik tells Engadget.

But she’s also quick to point out that the index is also meant to help Yelp users make “educated decisions” about where to spend their money. While you may not think much about visiting a coffee shop with a history of paying people to leave positive Yelp reviews, your feelings may be very different if you’re looking for a contractor to remodel your home, or for a daycare or moving company (all of which appear in the index).

Of course, fake reviews isn’t just a Yelp problem. Malik notes that phony reviews are often coordinated on other websites among organized groups of review rings. “We also hope that it inspires other review platforms to take a firmer stance against reduced solicitation and incentivisation,” she says.

Of course, the fake review problem goes beyond Yelp. The FTC reported that earlier this year, academic researchers infiltrated "incentivized review services geared toward Amazon" that solicited five-star reviews for more than 240,000 products. On Facebook, 250 groups were discovered brokering paid reviews of Amazon products—some with more than 500,000 members. The FTC noted that while Amazon claims to delist products soliciting incentivized reviews, only 25 of 1,600 products tracked by researchers were removed within a six-week period.

The consequences of paying for fake reviews could go beyond getting listed on Yelp's "wall of shame," though. Just last week, Amazon announced that two China-based review brokers were sentenced to 2.5 years after facilitating fake reviews in Amazon’s store between March 2021 and March 2022. It was only the second time that Amazon had ever helped law enforcement arrest review brokers, the company said.

Unlike many of the businesses that Yelp has indexed—which seem to mostly commission positive reviews—the review brokers working on Amazon would accept payment both to "boost a bad actor’s product ranking" or to leave "fake negative reviews to lower the ranking of a competitor’s product."