5 On Your Side

Negativity for hire: Teen fights back against fake online reviews

For years, Google, Yelp and Amazon have battled fake reviews, and now, so is Nextdoor.

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By
Monica Laliberte
, WRAL executive producer/5 On Your Side reporter

For years, Google, Yelp and Amazon have battled fake reviews, and now, so is Nextdoor.

Ben Poovey works a side job bringing dingy, old headlights back to life. But, he said he turned into an investigator after something weird happened with a glowing review from an actual customer on Nextdoor.

Poovey noticed comments from eight different accounts questioning his process. The posts also specifically recommended another local company.

"After thinking about how fishy these profiles were, I ended up image searching all of their profile pictures on Google," said Poovey. "When I Google searched 'Ashley Johnson,' it came up something Johnson consulting, which is a consulting firm in Tampa. I thought that was a little strange."

The next name that Poovey searched was 'Ann Harrison.' He said that name also yielded strange results.

"I found a page on heapfuneral.com stating that she had died in 2014 in Pennsylvania. After I researched this, it said she had joined Nextdoor in 2019, so obviously there's something going on there," said Poovey.

Poovey then reached out to a man in California whose pictures were being used by one of the profiles.

"We did reach out to Chris Anderson at UC Berkeley with the screenshot of his profile and the comments that he made. He responded that is definitely not me [and] thank you for making me aware," recalled Poovey.

It's called review hijacking -- or a negative review attack, and it's happening more often.

"What I always tell people to do is, you know, you've got to look at multiple platforms," said Jason Brown.

Brown is the creator of https://reviewfraud.org, a company that removes fake online reviews.

"Basically, the same people that you can hire to post fake positive reviews will actually sell services where they can actually post fake negative reviews," explained Brown.

Brown said Poovey's negative reviews on Nextdoor were the first time he's seen it on that social media website.

Brown said there's some ideas to who is behind the attacks.

The negative reviews impact everyone and serve as a reminder to pay very close attention when reading reviews.

"As long as there's an incentive to make money with these platforms through reviews - whether they're positive or negative - it's going to continue to happen until the platforms actually have to police themselves and crack down and start weeding out the bad actors," said Brown.

Poovey weeded out the bad actors in that Nextdoor thread by adding his research to the post so that readers could see the negative reviews were fake.

"After being call out on all of them, they actually ended up being deleted," said Poovey.

The owner of another local company named in the negative reviews told 5 On Your Side he'd look into the situation.

A spokesperson for Nextdoor said the company will "continue to monitor the situation" and that users who notice violations should contact the company.

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