Trustiser

Once again, Yelp is  in the news for fake reviews.  This time around, it is a mattresses and furniture  store in La Mesa, California.  “This business created a dozen or so accounts on Yelp from the same IP address (their IP address) which they used to create fake reviews of their own business,” said Vince Sollitto, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Yelp.  “The business then used those accounts to message people on Yelp offering to pay $25 by PayPal or mail for a five star vote,” Sollitto said.

As outlined in a previous post in this blog, fake ratings, along with the lack of models to manage trust placed in raters, haunt existing rating services and are  major issues undermining their credibility.  These issues should be addressed urgently, as more and more people rely on rating services to make increasingly important decisions.  We are of the opinion that these issues have to be addressed by combining a computational approach with a human controlling effort in order to substantially improve the overall trustworthiness of rating services, and this is what Trustiser is all about.

Rafik Hanibeche & Adel Amri (Trustiser Founders)