<story><title>How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction</title><url>https://medium.com/design-startups/9411fb583205</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lifeisstillgood</author><text>A few years back the major tv companies in the UK underwent a scandal involving faking tv phone-in competitions - runners on the show called in pretending to be viewers, calls went unregistered.  Almost none was intended to gain pecuniary advantage but it was fraud.  I think people went to jail.&lt;p&gt;I fail to see why the same scandal should not be seen here&lt;p&gt;Edit:  Reddit is deception, hard to see fraud.  Dating sites with fake profiles are likely to be fraud if its a pay site(AFF sounds outrageous). The odd ball is PayPal - if the eBay supplier got less money from the sale than if they had dealt with a normal user with a credit card the  I guess there could be a case for fraud.  Be interested in a real lawyers view</text></comment>
<story><title>How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction</title><url>https://medium.com/design-startups/9411fb583205</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>liquidcool</author><text>Missed a couple big ones from companies they mentioned. Yelp paid professional reviewers to seed cities they wanted to establish themselves in. To my knowledge they were honest reviews, but people were still put off by it.&lt;p&gt;And the Airbnb spam debacle was left out as well. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;davegooden.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;For the record, I use both services frequently, but those are notable omissions.&lt;p&gt;Really curious how much PayPal dumped into buying eBay items. Doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like something you could do for long, so I imagine it had to be highly targeted.</text></comment>