In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been pressuring Facebook to take measures to stop the practice of paid for fake likes and reviews, on Facebook and Instagram, since 2019.  Despite Facebook committing twice to take action, the CMA issued a statement this April 2021, saying they had to take further action to hold Facebook accountable to stop this practice as per this link CMA Facebook Intervention

This however, has one giant flaw which has contributed to myself and my husband being defrauded by a landscaper in excess of £10,000, and an estimated £50,000-£100,000 within our local area alone.  Tony Walters of The Modern Landscaper had a following of over 900 people on his Facebook business page, as well as over 30 glowing reviews.  He was doing work all around our local area and had signboards everywhere, so thinking he must be good at what he does, we asked him to quote.  The price seemed reasonable, and we agreed to hire him as we were in a hurry to have groundworks prepared for a garden office so my husband could continue to work from home during COVID.

The work was quoted as required 6 weeks, he started in Sept 2020, and was supposed to be done by mid Oct 2020.  Within 3 weeks he downed tools to work on another project and by the time he returned in Dec 2020, the weather was so bad, and he said he was so far behind schedule we mutually agreed to resume March 2021.  March came, Tony did not.  He eventually came back in April but between then and now Aug 2021, we estimate he worked a total of six full days in total and crucially, had still not provided the majority of materials needed to complete the project so we sent him a letter of demand to supply the materials, to which he initially agreed, only to renege the very next day (please marvel at what £17,000 of honestly and hard earned savings has left us with, much of which for my part I earned while working whilst being bed bound due to Long Term Lead Poisoning.)

At this point we knew we’d been had, so we started to look into his background, as we should have done in the beginning, but we had been lulled into a false sense of security by all the glowing Facebook reviews, pictures of projects he’d worked on, and our neighbours trust in him.  However as soon as we started, red flags started to show up immediately.  He had two companies struck off for never having filed any tax returns, and 7 court judgements against him.  Old Facebook posts of people warning others not to use him.  So my husband and I each posted negative reviews on his business page, along with several other unhappy customers.  We noticed at this point his star rating dropped to around 4.6.

A few days later however, it was back to a perfect 5!

We couldn’t understand it, as all the negative reviews were still there, then realised that he had obviously reported them to Facebook as being either being spam, or non genuine reviews.  What hit us harder are the following observations:

1). Facebook doesn’t need to have a review system, they choose to. But if they choose to, they should be managing it fairly as other sites like Trustpilot do, with content moderators who sometimes ask you to provide an invoice to prove your interaction with the company was real.

2). When Tony reported our reviews, we weren’t even notified, thus we can only assume that Facebook reviews are automatically removed from the star score so there is no oversight at all, which means that every negative review that came after ours was similarly reported, and removed from his star rating so he was able to maintain a perfect 5 star score.  Essentially giving him complete autonomy over his star rating, thus grossly being allowed to mislead customers by Facebook.

3). We mentioned to him we were aware he told us he had set up a Facebook group called Modern Landscaping 2020, and suspected that most of his likes and reviews were likely traded from this group.  Confirmed by such statements as one reviewer openly stated he had never met Tony, but could tell he was a “trustworthy” guy!  Shortly thereafter he started removing positive reviews from his score count too, confirming our suspicions.  Now he has taken his page offline completely.

In short, by not taking action to allow end users the opportunity to respond to businesses reporting and automatically removing negative reviews, and allowing real groups of people to coordinate amongst their industries to like and leave fake reviews for one another, Facebook has created a Wild West type environment, where what you see on a business page cannot be trusted. 

Even worse it means that Facebook is enabling fraudulent misrepresentation through this dereliction of duty, and being negligent by not abiding by this clause in their own T&Cs:

“Nothing in these Terms is intended to exclude or limit our liability for death, personal injury or fraudulent misrepresentation caused by our negligence, or to affect your statutory rights. We will exercise professional diligence in providing our Products and services to you and in keeping a safe, secure and error-free environment. Provided that we have acted with professional diligence, we do not accept responsibility for losses not caused by our breach of these Terms or otherwise by our acts; losses that are not reasonably foreseeable by you and us at the time of entering into these Terms; and events beyond our reasonable control.”

PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION TO MAKE FACEBOOK TAKE ACTION TO STOP ENABLING FRAUD, AND TO PROTECT IT’S USERS BY PROVIDING PROFESSIONAL OVERSIGHT AND DILIGENCE OVER THEIR STAR RATING SYSTEM.  SO THAT OTHERS LIKE US, OUR NEIGHBOURS, AND VULNERABLE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY LIKE THE ELDERY WHO HAVE TO LIVE ON LIMITED INCOME… AREN’T DEFRAUDED FROM THEIR HARD EARNING MONEY AND SAVINGS, BY FRAUDSTERS LIKE THE MODERN LANDSCAPER!