Copyright france24
In Brest, northwest France, estate agents like Le Cercle Immo are being blackmailed. Scammers post one-star reviews and demand money to take them down. "We couldn't believe it," said owner Vincent Bergot. "We wondered why our business was being attacked for no reason… I led them to think I would pay them and they removed five or six posts, but I obviously didn't pay, so they put them right back up." Across town, estate agent Morgane Gaendner also has a flood of one-star reviews from people she's never heard of. "I scrolled and scrolled… there were fifteen of them. I was stunned," she said. "It's like they're real. Anyone would say they're real reviews. It's not just one sentence. It’s a whole block of text." With the help of new artificial intelligence tools, convincing reviews are easier to fake than ever, even in a second language. Investigator Kay Dean, based in the United States, runs a pro-bono campaign called Fake Review Watch. She says the same group of Bangladeshi scammers harassing these estate agents in Brest is going after companies in Paris, Madrid and Mallorca as well. "There's this whole underworld of nefarious activity that you don't see on Google. And this includes an ocean of fake positive reviews, fake negative reviews and even extortion." Online, the scammers post about their expertise in digital marketing and, yes, providing Google reviews. It’s a dual business model: they both sell fake five-star ratings and extort money with one-star attacks. Dean has spent eight years tracking down such scams, identifying thousands of bogus ratings targeting small businesses worldwide. She said Google isn't doing enough. "Clearly Google's algorithm should be able to show that there's something fishy going on. And I show over and over again that they don't," she explained. "It's a massive problem. And I believe it's distorting the marketplace globally." Google responded with a blog post from April saying "advanced machine learning" helped them block more than 240 million policy-violating reviews last year, most of them before they were seen. But the businesses we spoke to said it can take months for reviews to be removed, and even once they are, more can crop up. One study found that seeing even a single review of three stars or less makes people half as likely to buy. So while small businesses are the easiest targets, even bigger ones can live or die by their reviews page.
