Travel website Tripadvisor identified and removed more than two million fraudulent reviews. This represents nearly 8.6 percent of all the reviews in 2020, according to the 2021 Tripadvisor Review Transparency Report released on October 27.
“Looking specifically at fake reviews, only a very small fraction of all review submissions — 3.6 percent — were determined to be fraudulent, totalling 943,205 reviews. Of those, Tripadvisor prevented 67.1 percent of all fake review submissions from ever making it onto the platform,” it said.
The company said that in 2020, it removed paid reviews from 131 different countries and identified a “spike” in paid reviews originating from India. India topped the list of countries with the most number of paid reviews overtaking Russia. It further clarified that the paid reviews do not necessarily mean properties in India were more prone to paid reviews but paid reviewers from India were greater.
The other countries in the list include Germany at second after India, Brazil at third, United States at fourth and Pakistan at fifth.
“Our investigators also identified shifting trends in where paid reviews originate from - with India overtaking Russia at the top of the list of countries from which paid reviews were submitted,” the report said.
Tripadvisor penalized 34,605 properties for fraudulent activity and banned 20,299 members for failing to abide by the platform’s community standards in 2020. The company’s fraud investigators also identified 65 new paid review sites and blocked paid review submissions from a total of 372 different paid review sites last year.
This is the second transparency report by Tripadvisor. The first one was released in September 2019 revealing that 66 million reviews were submitted to TripAdvisor in 2018 and 4.7 percent of them were rejected or removed and 2.1 percent were determined to be fraudulent.
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