Scam Tactics: How Easy It Is To Fool Experts and Review Sites, or allow them to fool you

Recently, there's an article at Vice.com, where the author decided to play a hoax on TripAdvisor... They created a FAKE restaurant, which is a picnic table in the back of the author's house, created some FAKE entrees (you'll laugh at the ingredients), got some FAKE reviews through burner phones and whatnot, and got it to be the top-rated restaurant in London... a restaurant that does NOT exist.

I won't spoil the method, let's just say, it's easier than you think.

This wasn't the first prank the author, Oobah Butler, had done. Previously he bullsh*tted his way onto Paris Fashion Week and it was absolutely brilliant. But he's hardly the first to prank experts and succeded.

But then, expert reviews are fooled all the time.  In 2008, wine critic and author Robin Goldstein created a fake restaurant, allegedly stocked with the worst wines Wine Spectator magazine had ever rated. The submitted it to the said magazine. After a while, the fake restaurant had won "award of excellence" by the same magazine.

Wine Spectator called it "publicity seeking stunt", but it exposes something deeply troubling... What sort of experts at the magazine review the candidate for "award of excellence"?  And if they let a fake restaurant get on, what can DELIBERATE manipulation do?

But the pattern ran much much deeper than that. Experts are fooled ALL THE TIME.

• TV host displayed a $15 IKEA print in an art museum, and none of the art experts spotted the problem. 
• The Wine Spectator gag had a sequel... a French scientist decided to die a white wine red and gave it to 54 wine science students. NONE could detect they are tasting a white wine.  
• Food experts cannot tell McDonalds chicken McNuggets from "organic" chicken nuggets. In fact, people cannot tell organic fruit from non-organic fruit

And the problem doesn't stop there. There are review and authority websites that secretly signs under-the-table deals with crooks to promote or write nice articles without any disclosure. And this had been a long-standing problem in network marketing.




The problem with compromised authority and under-the-table deals were exposed when ZeekRewards collapsed. That is when we found that some movers and shakers in MLM had under-the-table deals paid by Zeek to deflect criticism of Zeek.

One certain individual was paid $6000 PER MONTH to deflect negative press, conduct interviews to make the company look good, etc, without disclosing was he was being paid to do so.

Another certain individual, was publicly employed as a consultant by Zeek, made Zeek "company of the month" in his newsletter (at estimated cost of 100K) as well as a position in the tree that is estimated to be earning in 40K a month, when he apparently said something that got him fired. What nobody bothered researching was the same consultant had pulled the SAME STUNT before... Made a press-release to help a company do a pump-and-dump without disclosing he was being paid to do so.  SEC charged the perp with wrongdoing 4+ years after the scheme was closed.

I am not going to talk about lawyers that got ensnared in the Zeek mess. They were being PUBLICLY paid to do so, and that's not what we're talking about.

What can we do about it?

If you are thinking about leveraging crowd intelligence, that doesn't work either. Oobah Butler, who organized the TripAdivsor prank, opened his Vice.com report by saying he used to post shill TripAdvisor reviews for 10 quids (that's 10 British Pounds for you yanks) each. Review sites can't get rid of shill reviews, despite suing people left and right.  Amazon has spawned TWO separate "review of reviews" sites (fakespot.com) and reviewmeta.com to check if the reviews are real or fake.  Nowadays, shill review writing are outsourced to people working for pennies in India. And it's gotten so bad, Indian consumers have lost confidence in online product ratings and reviews.

The only one you can trust... IS YOURSELF.  And sometimes, you can't even trust yourself.

It's called "cognitive bias". Admit it, everybody has them. It's BUILT into your brain (and mine).  Everybody has them. After all, conmen and scammers know exactly which buttons to push.

So what can you do? Adopt skepticism. Skepticism is the perfect counter to scammers, and lets you work around biases and detect failure in experts.

• Skeptics are NOT afraid to challenge bull**** sprouted by leaders
• Skeptics do NOT accept tales at face value, but always seek verification from trusted sources
• Skeptics regard arrogance as posturing, NOT proof or validation
• Skeptics do NOT trust claims of esoteric knowledge of technique
• Skeptics do NOT accept attempts to delay the inevitable. 

Be skeptical.