Montreal's No. 1 Restaurant on Tripadvisor Didn't Really Exist

hubie writes:

Fake listing for Le Nouveau Duluth raises questions about online tourism platforms:

Yoo Jeung has been running Le Spot St-Denis, at the corner of Duluth Avenue and St-Denis Street for 22 years. Her flower shop is supposedly right next to the top-rated restaurant in Montreal on Tripadvisor, Le Nouveau Duluth, but she says she's never heard of it.

She says she knows the area very well and tourists often ask her for directions to restaurants.

"But Nouveau Duluth? No," she said - and something about the online listing seemed off to her.

"There's a very high ceiling [in the photos]," she said. "On Duluth there are no high ceilings ... it looks fake."

[...] Le Nouveau Duluth does not exist but the ease with which it rose to the top of a travel advice site is a clear example of how easy it is to create buzz with no substance behind it - and what challenges real restaurants face getting noticed in the algorithm.

The page was taken down after CBC sent a request for a response from Tripadvisor. The popular travel site responded saying stunts that create a fake restaurant listing are "uncommon occurrences and do not share the characteristics of genuine instances of fraud."

[...] Though he's never encountered a fake restaurant on Tripadvisor, cybersecurity expert Terry Cutler says fake reviews are relatively easy to spot.

"If you look at the reviews, a lot of the time they're so vague, like 'Great job,' 'Keep it up,' it has nothing to do with what the review is about," he said.

"If you start seeing nothing but five-star reviews - there's never any negative comments - that should be a sign that there's something wrong."

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