Professional assessment division ubiquitously invaded the area of ​​O2O reviews recently

Huang Yuan

The "Professional Reviewers", who were extorted by Taobao merchants from the public, recently focused their attention on the growing field of O2O reviews.

As a result of a report from a merchant, the Shanghai police recently conducted a joint anti-purging operation. Some third-party speculation agencies were prosecuted by the police for "extortion" and transferred to the public prosecutor's office. The company was also ordered by the police to stop business.

Influenced by many "bad reviewers" and "favorable commentators", the basis of review websites based on the network evaluation is gradually loosened. To this end, technical means, artificial teamwork and legal channels for a multi-pronged "crackdown" has also become one of the most important part of the review website.

Professional assessment division rampant

In May of this year, the owner of a hotel in Shanghai found a bad review on the public comment page of their business. He then received a phone call from a person claiming to be a "public comment network" and claimed that he could help businesses delete bad reviews and raise ratings. However, the next day he said he was not a "public comment network" Staff, but the owner only need to spend 1,500 yuan per month to enjoy the praise they provide services, which was rejected by the owner. Since then, the above people began to work together with other employees of the company, register trumpet, the merchants bad review. Owner immediately alarm.

In the end, according to the person's motive for committing the crime, the police prosecuted them for "extortion". At present, the case has been transferred to the prosecutor's office, will enter the formal criminal proceedings. The company was also sealed by the police because of the incident and ordered to stop business.

According to "First Financial Daily" reporter learned from informed sources, the company is involved in an illegal network of public relations agencies in Songjiang, mainly through the public comment on the net registration "trumpet", malicious negative feedback, then extortion profits. At present, the company's computer equipment has been sealed, one of the people involved in the case was filed by public security organs.

In fact, this action against third-party speculation agencies is not the first in Shanghai. In March 2012, Shanghai Xinjing Industrial and Commercial Office investigated and dealt with the joint public comment on the illegitimate cases of false trading in the third-party review platform.

An industrial and commercial personnel who participated in the above scene court enforcement reminded this reporter that more than 10 computers were placed in a 10-square-meter room and that nearly 10 "naval networks" employed had hundreds of vest accounts , Each person per day need to be responsible for dozens of vest account "irrigation" and speculation "false reviews" work. At present, this company to write fake praise profiteering suffered severe administrative penalties and has been closed.

As users praise and star is an important indicator of business reputation, will also affect the user's choice, most businesses are highly valued user reviews. Also for this reason, the third-party speculation agencies blackmail the seller through speculation.

Yesterday, reporters interviewed some businesses and found that most merchants chose to spend money when they first encountered extortion from third-party speculators. However, when they stepped up the asking price step by step, almost all merchants would choose to refuse.

One restaurant chain, who declined to be named restaurant owner said that the beginning willing to spend money, one reason there is some luck, that brush some praise will be good for their reputation shop; Second, if rejected, worried about these Professional assessment division will retaliate, with a large number of negative feedback damage to the credibility of the store and source, would rather be a major event of small things. However, what I did not expect is to feed the tiger, a lot of speculation agencies is to seize their psychological, step by step lion big openings, the cost of tens of dollars, a few hundred dollars, up to now thousands of thousands of yuan.

"Make an inappropriate analogy, it is a bit like the movie inside triad protection fee, which makes us very passive, but also anger." The above said.

For the behavior of third-party speculation agencies and CPAs, Beijing Shengfeng Law Firm's attorneys Yu Guofu gave a clear judicial decision and explanation: the act of giving merchants money to pay by giving a negative rating on the public comment platform It is illegal. He said that this is a typical case of extortion and that in the case of a large amount or a large number of cases, the perpetrator will constitute an extortion.

Yu Guofu claimed that according to Article 274 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China: Extortion of public and private property is extorted in large amounts or extorted for many times, and it is to be sentenced to not more than three years of fixed-term imprisonment, criminal detention or public surveillance, If the amount is huge or there are other serious circumstances, they shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than 10 years and a fine; if the amount is huge or there are other particularly serious circumstances, they shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than ten years and fined.

There are always people who better than you

The latest statistics from Analysys International show that in 2013, the overall size of China's O2O market reached 462.3 billion yuan, up 69% from 2012. From the category share, the proportion of motor vehicles accounted for 29.5%, apparel and apparel accounted for 21.4%, appliances 15.7%, catering 12.6%, food / daily hundred 4.2%.

Due to the rise of the O2O market, professional judges also fought in this emerging field.

"The difficulty is that commentators who eat and drink O2O are not only the actual payer, but also other subject experiencers." Analysys International analyst Lu Qiong believes there is a paradox in the middle that if banning non-payer reviews Resulting in the number of reviews is not active; but let go, it is difficult to avoid professional assessment division and other "staring" random comments.

In Lu Qiong's opinion, learn from foreign O2O and the history of the development of the domestic electricity supplier industry, such as: foreign Yelp, domestic Taobao and so on have a category of integrity department, most O2O reviews have their own independent team integrity. In general, the magic height of one foot still need "high moral."

According to the statistics provided by the public comments, in 2013, the public comment integrity team masked more than 260,000 accounts (veterans, the Water Army account), 92 high-star members (4 stars and above members); Among them, more than 20 deleted Hype critics more than 2,000 businesses.

The public comments related parties, internal comments in the public, there is a completely independent buy, promotion, booking and other profit indicators of the department, KPI assessment from sales performance. The team is part of the technology platform, the person in charge of reporting to the technology platform VP; its job responsibilities are constantly anti-cheating, anti-speculation, combat false reviews, only responsible for the integrity of the comments.

Since its inception in 2003, in order to ensure the independence and objectivity of the content of the website, the public comments gradually formed a very strict editorial code, a large number of Xiaobian according to the rules of all aspects of manual inspection, supplemented by technical means to filter. Artificial censorship in the early days, supplemented by technical algorithm filtering.

However, with the rapid development of the website, the number of reviews is also growing at a geometric level. Every day tens or even hundreds of thousands of reviews to review, how to ensure that every comment is the true experience of consumers does not seem easy. At the same time, some members in order to pursue the number of reviews and other personal purposes resulting from the short reviews, plagiarism reviews, as well as individual businesses opportunistic, artificially hype, and even some gray intermediary companies began to "comment hype" as a profit point, making Editor for the review management more difficult.

In 2010, the public commented on the selection of the company's multi-sectoral elite to set up a key project team. According to the website's years of actual operational experience and data records, combined with different characteristics of the life service industry, the project adopted various advanced Internet technologies and took six months to review the Internet Integrity technology system made an important upgrade. Based on the manual review, this credit system focuses on "business objective index" and "membership creditability". By continuously improving the technical algorithms and eliminating human factors, the credit system more rigorously and scientifically manages the online evaluation platform.

With the increasing influence of the website, coupled with factors such as the market structure of the industry and changing consumer trends, the demand for creditworthiness is even higher. At the same time, the emergence of various gray intermediary companies driven by profit has constantly pointed out the importance of the websites Mechanism, technical algorithms, special research, making the public comments must also continue to speed up their own technical system based on the actual update rate, the basic technical algorithm filtering, supplemented by manual review.

In terms of the review mechanism, a comment to be displayed in the public comment page for reference to other users, subject to a large number of algorithms test.

At present, there are about 100 kinds of public comment on the screening of fake reviews, and weekly new algorithms to identify new emerging speculation tools, has been able to remove 95% of fake reviews, including copying similar comments, comments on irrigation, Speculation comments, non-personal / non-experience reviews 10 comments will be blocked.

In addition, in order to ensure the accuracy of the algorithm and improve the recognition rate of fake reviews, Public Comment Integrity Team also conducted research on basic anti-cheat algorithms in cooperation with well-known American universities and the rotating president of the United Data Mining Association Bing Liu and his research team. The United States credit card fraud identification of advanced algorithms, technically walking in the forefront of the world.

"Because of the special nature of O2O reviews, it must be a technical + manual team to ensure the authenticity of the comments," said Lu Qiong.