PR is Dead! Long Live PR!

We all know how little cred online review sites yield. New York has taken the issue up with a substantive investigation. Going undercover, agents posed as a local merchant who wanted to boost his online review ratings:

“The investigation revealed a web of deceit in which reviewers in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Eastern Europe produced, for as little as a dollar a rave, buckets of praise for places they had never seen in countries where they had never been.”

Deception has many facets, including denial:


“They also went on review sites that criticized their own fake-review operations and wrote fake reviews denying they wrote fake reviews."
Give Yourself 5 Stars? Online, It Might Cost You - NYTimes.com.