Have you been Sarahed?

After @DaiLun found out that "Sarah A" commandeered his elegant wordsmithing into her"own" review on Yelp, it seems that most or all of her Yelp reviews are plagiarized from this site. If you are Sarah, imI curious to know why you do this . It's a lot of work for no pay.

Here's one that cropped at least one sentence from a vmb trip report and maybe more.

A 3 star review of Sterling Brunch by Sarah A.:
https://www.yelp.com/biz/sterling-brunch-las-vegas?hrid=JV8X9NbyNs5l6qoS8a1xpw&utm_source=ashare&ref=yelp-android

Original source
https://www.vegasmessageboard.com/forums/index.php?threads/82-blissful-solo-hours-6-2-5.152216/#post-1648681

 

I have. 5 of mine are posted by her. Reported her to Yelp, not that I expect anything will happen

 

Maybe just follow her on Yelp to see if she strikes again?

 

Well that's just weird. I bet 'Sarah' is building a fake identity for catfishing.

"I'm 23, athletic with long blond hair. Oh, and love good food. Check out my Yelp reviews".

 

@azlefty - Thank you for taking the time to go a little deeper. I will keep the VMB membership informed as to what (if anything) I hear from Yelp.

 

Yeah this is a strange case....

 

I tried posting a message asking "why do you keep stealing reviews from Vegas Message Board and posting them her as your own?", but she has blocked me so I can't.

Subsequently, I reported her to Yelp and sent them this thread.

 

This seems like a good explanation. In fact I wonder if Sarah is actually a bot, or a human assisted app that shuffles social media posts across platforms to generate fake profiles for phishing. My guess is that it is a whack a mole problem for Yelp and they can address flagged accounts but it's very difficult to screen out fake profiles without screening out legitimate profiles. Because sometimes real people post their own reviews both here and on yelp, which may be a violation of terms of service somewhere vbu probably done anyway and not worth shutting down an account for.

 

NP but I predict that it won't be very fruitful. See last post.

 

That sucks. I don’t do yelp but will take a look now!

 

So far, I don't think we have any reason to believe she/it is a member here, just scraping content to be posted elsewhere.

 

I was also wondering if this could be a robot from Yelp. They're already known for doing "shady" stuff.

 

I suppose it's possible, but they would risk a lot by pulling an Ashley Madison and potentially alienating their large community of users who generate content for free, which in turn drives their ad business. In my limited experience, they seem to want to protect the integrity of their reviews.

 

Yeah, but remember the incident in which they offered businesses the opportunity to remove "bad reviews" if they purchased advertising? You know, s**t like that? I'm waiting to see what Yelp says.

 

I didn't know about that. I agree that would qualify as shady.

 

Sonya, I reported her to Yelp too with a link to the thread about the plagiarized reviews. I was wondering - since you are the owner of this site that content is being stolen from, would it be possible for you to contact Yelp support and see if they can give you her IP address so she can be blocked? Of course they might say no but you're not asking for any identifiable personal information - just the IP address so she can no longer steal the content from a site you own and manage.

 

Yes! Two friends own restaurants and if they didn't advertise their negative reviews would be moved to the top. Whereupon …

A restaurant (I believe in San Fransisco) publicly requested customers to write only bad reviews. I think they had a contest with awards for the most creative.

 

If it's a bad actor, it's very likely coming from a compromised web server and the offender has many more to choose from and uses a software app to do it automatically. It's a game of whack a mole.