<story><title>I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fasteddie</author><text>Similar to this, a few years back my then-roommates and I created a fake restaurant at our apartment, named after the nickname we gave to our kitchen. It was meant to be our own inside joke and we gave it a couple reviews ourselves.&lt;p&gt;The 4.5 star review caused us to get some walkup traffic, at which point we thought it was too real and canceled the experiment, although the page is still live if you link to it through our review history.&lt;p&gt;The best was a group of young 20 somethings who showed up and were really good-natured about the joke, so we invited them up for a beer and they dropped us a 5-star review.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>frgtpsswrdlame</author><text>&amp;gt;The representative adds that &amp;quot;most fraudsters are only interested in trying to manipulate the rankings of real businesses&amp;quot;, so the &amp;quot;distinction between attempted fraud by a real business, as opposed to attempted fraud for a non-existent business, is important&amp;quot;. To catch these people out, TripAdvisor uses &amp;quot;state-of-the-art technology to identify suspicious review patterns&amp;quot; and says, &amp;quot;Our community too can report suspicious activity to us.&amp;quot; They then quote a 2015 study that found &amp;quot;93 percent of TripAdvisor users said they find the reviews they read to be accurate of the actual experience&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If TripAdvisor can&amp;#x27;t catch out a restaurant which is entirely a farce how can they pretend they&amp;#x27;re catching out real businesses who might be nudging their results up a bit?</text></comment>