Tech to spot fake reviews on Google Maps
Hi Hackers! :)

I built a truthtelling engine to help consumers make better spending decisions online by knowing if a business has real or fake reviews on Google Maps.
We built a free chrome extension for people who want to see how our system works and how we can scan a business in a few short minutes.

We launched today!

I'm totally blown away by all of you who commented on the PH post: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-transparency-company

The backstory:
...9 years ago, I was a student nurse with 32k in student debt. I wrote about it a while back on another article here: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/the-business-idea-that-got-me-out-of-30k-in-nursing-school-debt-e32f189370

I was offered $32,000 to solve the fake review problem for a prominent physician. Got the check, scaled a reputation agency, and then went back to school to learn how to code.

You can guess what happened next.

I built my first software company, Objection.co to dispute fake reviews for business owners, just like the doctor who originally pulled me out of nursing.
Then I realized that most fake reviews weren't impacting my customers, business owners. They were impacting consumers and the whole marketplace.
I started working on a fake review database, purchasing fake review data from the very people that sell fake reviews to businesses. They would ask, so how many reviews do you need? I'd say, nono I'm not a regular customer - I want to buy all of the data from all the fake reviews you have ever sold. Some would sell, some wouldn't. However, after 2k-3k fake reviews in my dataset, I knew it wasn't nearly enough. I knew I needed to climb the ladder and meet bigger fake review sellers. I finally made a contact and we agreed to meet in person.

I went flew to India to meet a major player in the fake review space, with a dataset of over 1+ million fake reviews sold.

India is a fascinating place, I've never experienced poverty like it before. When you see the overwhelming poverty in India with your own eyes, it's easy to understand why so many take to careers in Black Hat Reputation Management. There's zero punishment in these countries for fake reviews, and there's a HUGE demand for it here in the USA. In 2019 and 2020, Google Maps removed 130 million fake reviews.

Now that I had enough data, I realized I needed to either hire a full-time data scientist or learn how to do it myself.

I went back to school at MIT for Data Science and Machine Learning and I started working on metrics to understand fake reviews better.

When COVID-19 first hit, Google stopped responding to review disputes. Objection.co came to a complete halt as we couldn't perform any services for our customers. I decided to put the pedal to the metal on fake review data analysis, and about a year later we are happy to bring our MVP to market.

https://askfortransparency.com

and our Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/transparency-for-chrome/dpbdljognlepohfjceebghhelcggikdc

Our mission is to help consumers work with businesses with real reviews an
d to help businesses with real reviews, thrive.
Thanks for your time, would love any comments/feedback/reviews!