provide a way to flag obviously fake feedback
I posted a review once for an apartment complex that was an absolute nightmare to live in, so I get emails every time a new review is posted. After months of mostly negative reviews, there are all of a sudden four positive reviews posted this week - five-star reviews without a single complaint! This seems EXTREMELY suspicious to me - pretty flagrant "ballot-stuffing" by the management - but there doesn't appear to be any way of flagging them as likely false. You can flag it as "removeable" but that's the closest you can get. A flag for "sock puppet" would be great.
This feature exists on the site. There is a “report” link next to each review and options are provided to categorize it.
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Anonymous commented
I know for a fact that the managers at The Meadows at Cascade Park in Vancouver, WA. fake positive reviews. I've had 2 neighbors move out in the last few months because of the problems and as soon as my lease is up I'm out of here too!
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Anonymous commented
Arbor Creek Apts in Beaverton, OR is paying $50 for a positive review.
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Anonymous commented
Keswick Park in Crofton, MD is posting FAKE reviews. . .
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manchicken commented
Bent Tree Apartments in Centreville, VA sent out a notice encouraging people to rate their apartments as part of a sweepstakes to win an iPad Mini. It seems unethical to solicit "feedback" on a third party ratings site. If they wanted to collect internal feedback they could just as easily use SurveyMonkey. This clearly seems like a case of ballot-stuffing.
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Anonymous commented
I'm seeing this now for an old complex, and it makes me doubt the site. Under review? Really...and how will we know if any action is taken?
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Anonymous commented
I agree with the top post here, The Arbors in Murrieta, CA has been spamming this site with positive reviews for a couple months. As a result their percentage has increased by 20 points.
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Anonymous commented
The Arbors in Murrieta, CA also posting an abundance of fake reviews
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Mark commented
Noticed the same exact thing, happening for the Trillium North apartment complex now.
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Anonymous commented
I had EXACTLY the same observation as this poster. I posted a review for Chapel Hill Apartments in Lewisville Texas a few years ago and now receive alerts every time a new review is posted. And, usually there are maybe 2-3 new reviews per month, mostly negative, then TODAY alone (11/26/2013) there are 16 new reviews, all glowing positive (except for one that was just pointing out the obvious fakeness). This property does things to prompt reviews, maybe $10 off next month's rent, or something like that. And surely they have every one of their staff fill out multiple reviews. But it really hurts the believability of reviews. Please, think of some way to penalize the fake reviews.
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Andrew Bodine commented
See the comment directly below mine. Obvious fake positive reviews at Runaway Bay. They're trying to make years of horrible reviews go away through lying rather than improve that dump. The terms of service (yes, I read them) state that pretending to be someone else or misrepresenting your affiliation with an institution is not allowed, but it's impossible to report this particular violation.
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Anonymous commented
Runaway Bay Columbus Ohio. I would be happy to report this site as one that appears to take bribes in the way of ad money.
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Anonymous commented
Yes, this is a big problem, Ignacio Hills Apartments' management keeps leaving five star reviews, and gets any comments deleted about how suspicious it looks. The woman who's doing them is even out on a witch hunt for anybody who might be doing it. I'm tired of them artificially raising the rating. On top of that it goes against the site's tos!
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Anonymous commented
They should take responsibility for the lack of tools or resources to control fake feedback. I wonder if they can be reported to the BBB for problems with their provided service. Fake feedback is not serving those who are looking at rating sites like this to help with making a decision to move to any of these apartments listed here.
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Sandra E. Lewis commented
You are exactly correct! That is because management pulls some of its insider tenants or former insider tenants (and they all have 'em) to post that fishy stuff.
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Anonymous commented
Yup, I totally know what you mean. We actually CAUGHT the apartment staff at our old complex typing in fake reviews when we were living there and when we posted a bad review ourselves, there was enough to identify us and the manager actually called and THREATENED me over the phone telling me it was in the lease that we couldn't leave any negative reviews about them.
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Brett Reynolds commented
I agree whole-heartedly with this suggestion, and have just posted a similar one of my own in hopes that something in done about this in general, and particularly about a property that has been doing exactly what is described in the suggestion. During the course of the past hour, nine reviews have been posted for River Part Apartments in Orlando FL, and all have been glowingly positive, many from free email accounts that take seconds to set up (Google, Yahoo, etc). It is not difficult to identify when one person (or an office full of them) are abusing online systems - use IP addresses and useragents to identify what computers are being used to post reviews, and disallow or flag reviews that come from the same computer during a short period of time.
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Daniel Freiheit commented
This website is not going to do very well, I think, until they take bogus reviews more seriously. For my building it seems fairly obvious that six out of six reviews were fake. I haven't posted yet ;) When I went to 'report abuse', there was no place to indicate that ALL SIX were fake, no place to comment on the report either. So how will they know why I'm reporting the abuse? And I have to laboriously go through the page SIX TIMES to report? I don't think so.
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Denis Hanlon commented
It seems to me that the "word" is getting out about fake reviews, which are usually pretty
easy to recognize. Obviously, though, some positive reviews are legitimate.
For whatever it is worth, the last time I responded with my REAL NAME. I have never been
a fan of anonymous.Denis Hanlon
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Joe commented
I agree with this. This is in regards to Camden Crest in Raleigh, NC. The apartment complex is one of the worst in town. Heavy criminal activity (please refer to Raleigh PD for verification), poor maintenance, and HORRIBLE staff. Apartment ratings needs to change the way they "verify" residents. It needs to be done so that staffers and their friends cannot skew the ratings just to make it look better.
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jason commented
NO THAT WOULD MAKE THIS SITE = TRUE! THEY DEPEND ON FALSE FEEDS