spam ratings of the robot/new account

Hello everyone! Greetings from Taiwan!

I’m Nate!

Recently I noticed a weird issue and maybe we can discuss and share our idea to make Google maps better!

Because of a political issues, some people/ accounts are attacking the rating/review of google maps.

Here is the news!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/08/storm-in-a-bubble-tea-cup-over-taiwanese-firms-support-for-hong-kong-protesters

In short, a tea shop(Teamate) in Germany (https://www.google.com.tw/maps/place/Teamate/@51.2216388,6.7895964,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x47b8ca305328df67:0xd2ac7c9b98c8cbd0!8m2!3d51.2216388!4d6.7917851) claim their political statement and got many malicious or mean rating or reviews. This people might not even visited the tea shop before and gave such mean reviews and rating. One of a ridiculous said the tea shop couldn’t give him pickle flavor bubble tea? and then rated the tea shop 1.

Most of those weird reviews/ratings only use their accounts for 1 or 2 reviews/ratings, which means they might be just opened (robot). If a place got too many reviews/ratings in a short time by accounts who only left one review of all time, maybe google maps can temporally hidden their reviews/ratings in case they affect other innocent users.

I felt truly sad about this issue, anyone can hold their different ideas but please be respectful to others.

Hopefully, google maps rating/review is only affected by people’s real reaction and not related to any political issues.

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I believe this kind of spam catcher is already implemented. An even more aggressive measure could be to only allow us to review placed where we have been according to our timeline. Also feel free to report the reviews you suspect of being false.

Hi @Nate-Lo ,

Thank you for reaching out!

In this case you should report those suspicious reviews directly from Google Maps. You can read how to do it in Flag inappropriate reviews. This article might be helpful as well: How to identify and report fraud on Google Maps

I am moving your topic to How-tos section.

Thank you once again for you effort.

1 Like