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Big Store using alts for 5 star reviews


lachannCraft
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From what I can see, if you search these suspected alts. They don't have a ''my.secondlife'' an existing profile. And the google search shows just items they have reviewed from said store. The legit profiles always have the profile at top of the results. I have found about 7 suspected alts so far. 

Is this report worthy? Or Second life just lets exploitative trashy 'creators'  get away with it?

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Not new news. Also used to give one star NASTY reviews of competitors products.  While The Lab certainly has the ability to clarify that these are actually arts (sometimes just friends but mostly alts) they have other things to do. If you really WANT to, you can comment on the comments of your suspected violators pointing to what you have said here :D.  

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Well that sucks :( I doubt that me commenting on reviews would make a difference, and also, I do not want to come across as a whining troll with nothing better to do. It just pissed me off, as I got exploited and lied to after making the store a custom mesh. This person doesn't even do any modelling or design, get's everyone else to do it. I guess this persons role in the company is to scam, deceive and write false reviews. Good work, bravo. 

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There is an easy way to report it.

Flag the review, choose 'Inappropriate Review', and then choose ' Review by alt of seller'. LL will check to see if this is really the case. You don't have proof though, but they will probably investigate it anyway, because nobody would have proof unless you actually know the seller. But that is one of their options, and meant to be used.

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5 hours ago, Rya Nitely said:

There is an easy way to report it.

Flag the review, choose 'Inappropriate Review', and then choose ' Review by alt of seller'. LL will check to see if this is really the case. You don't have proof though, but they will probably investigate it anyway, because nobody would have proof unless you actually know the seller. But that is one of their options, and meant to be used.

 As you say nobody has proof that someone is an alt of someone else so I don’t see the point in having it be one of the options. 

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One of the first things I bought on the SL Marketplace was a dress with loads of good reviews (I didn't know about demos then laugh.png ). It was actually quite nice, but when I went back to post a (positive) review I noticed that all of the ~20 reviews, all 5 stars, had been posted within a day or two of each other then nothing for the past year or more. It was obvious what was going on, so I left a one-star review mentioning all the fake 5-stars; I don't know if it survived.

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27 minutes ago, angeoco said:

all 5 stars, had been posted within a day or two of each other then nothing for the past year or more. It was obvious what was going on, so I left a one-star review mentioning all the fake 5-stars; I don't know if it survived.

In defence of this, that doesn't actually surprise me and shouldn't be taken as clear evidence unless they're clearly writing information which cannot be substantiated.  I released a product for the first time in probably a couple of years.  Several of my long standing loyal customers immediately left reviews.  None since.  I have rarely received reviews sometimes gaps of years between reviews and the number of reviews compared to the number of purchases is massively one sided.

What would be a better indicator would be to be able to view the other reviews of a purchaser.  We could do that once, before Linden Lab bought Xstreet, you could see what else someone had reviewed.  It would be fairly obvious if someone used an alt to pimp their own products and only their own products.  Yes they could still game the system by purchasing other items and writing reviews but then that's effort.  Not everyone can be bothered.

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1 hour ago, angeoco said:

had been posted within a day or two of each other then nothing for the past year or more. It was obvious what was going on, so I left a one-star review mentioning all the fake 5-stars; I don't know if it survived.

I have seen this happen because a creator releases something with an incentive to their in world group.. buy in next 48 hours and leave a MP review and get a discount/giftcard/some inventive.  As far as I know this is allowed as long as that incentive to review involves ANY review - 5 star or not but lets face it, who is going to leave a 1 star and risk losing the incentive to review?  

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13 hours ago, angeoco said:

... I noticed that all of the ~20 reviews, all 5 stars, had been posted within a day or two of each other then nothing for the past year or more....

So, 5 star reviews within a short period of time can happen for various reasons:- your loyal customers/fans buying a new item and loving you no matter what; it could be in return for a discount/gift; or it could be 'fake'. In my eyes, and when deciding whether to buy based on reviews, I see all 3 reasons the same. Many 5 star reviews within a short period of time sets off a warning.

But I'd never flag an item based on 'fake ' reviews because you just don't know.

Edited by Rya Nitely
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On 09 December 2017 at 7:58 AM, lachannCraft said:

They don't have a ''my.secondlife'' an existing profile. And the google search shows just items they have reviewed from said store. The legit profiles always have the profile at top of the results.

I'm sure many merchants use alts for reviews, however... Just for the record...

You chosen method if identifying an 'alt' is completely worthless. As indeed are most "alt detection schemes" dreamed up by non Lindens.

The profile feeds on my.secondlife.com have optional privacy settings, where you can limit who sees the feed, everyone/secondlife only/friends only.

Many people don't use the feeds at all.

As for googling for somebody, if their feed is private, and they don't specifically log in to and post on the forums, google wont find squat on them.



 

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Klytyna.

I actually found the profiles, was just being noob again :P  All are relatively new. And if you search the names, it just shows links to this store, no other store. Anyway, thanks all for the replies. I just wanted to find out if this was quite common and if it was worth reporting. I was going through quite a bit of rage, but that has passed. Time to chill and make some 5 star worthy content ;) 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Anyone with more than 1 yr of exp in mesh fashion in SL can sniff one of these worthless stores from a mile away. I know exactly which store OP is referring to, and I actually flagged a lot of their products in the past as well, and probably even wrote a thread about it a while back. Here are the facts:

  • LL doesn't give a crap about fake reviews. Why? Fake reviews = more sales = more $ in LL's pockets. A few pissed off customers like OP and myself don't mean a pickle to them
  • LL doesn't allow announcing the store's name here because it will hurt their sales = hurt LL's $
  • It takes less than 20min to create 20 alts. Within an hour you have an instant "hot selling" product
  • That store is known to constantly remove listings with negative reviews and repost them, or somehow bribing LL to remove negative reviews
  • All their demos changed to 1L after they found people 1-starring their crappy product demos. Absolutely pathetic
  • The creator pretends to create "original mesh", when in reality has zero talent and just uses cheap full perm mesh kits. A simple inspect on any of their products will reveal the creator name

Just a quick tip: use the NOT operator to filter out this crappy store from your marketplace searches. For example, search "dress NOT [store name]", case-sensitive and needs to match EXACT name (cause LL's search algorithm sucks donkey balls) to filter out any garbage by [store name].

Edited by Suki Hirano
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14 hours ago, Suki Hirano said:

 

  • LL doesn't give a crap about fake reviews. Why? Fake reviews = more sales = more $ in LL's pockets. A few pissed off customers like OP and myself don't mean a pickle to them
  • LL doesn't allow announcing the store's name here because it will hurt their sales = hurt LL's $
  • It takes less than 20min to create 20 alts. Within an hour you have an instant "hot selling" product
  • That store is known to constantly remove listings with negative reviews and repost them, or somehow bribing LL to remove negative reviews
  • All their demos changed to 1L after they found people 1-starring their crappy product demos. Absolutely pathetic
  • The creator pretends to create "original mesh", when in reality has zero talent and just uses cheap full perm mesh kits. A simple inspect on any of their products will reveal the creator name

LL doesn't allow naming and shaming merchants on this forum because it would have caused a flood of unfair and deliberately false accusations. That's actually very sensible of them.

They don't always react on fake reviews and relistings to get rid of reviews because their methods for monitoring the MP are too inefficient and labor intensive. There's certainly room for improvement there.

Apart from that, yes, this is not uncommon practice on MP at all and a "big name" does not necessarily mean a honest merchant. :(

On the bright side, reviews don't matter nearly as much as they used to. LL did finally realize how dodgy the whole review system is so ratings don't affect the ranking very much - if they affect it at all. I have a friend who runs a clothes store on MP and one specific color variant of one of his outfits seems to be jinxed - it keeps getting one star reviews even though all the other color variants only have five star ones. The one-star one is still his best seller.

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Hi, all stores (not only SL!) pay for  reviews, some even delete bad ones and only keep the good.

Do you really think Am.... eB... only has real reviews from real people who bought the product ? O.o

That´s all talkin abour RL so why would it be different in SL.

It´s a million dollar fake review buisness.

Monti

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