[Fugley]

At wevet.com we have had a posting about a website flatmateclick.co.uk .

At this site you may register to find a room to share and also register if you have a room to let.

The registration process, nor the sign up, alerts you to the fact that BOTH sides have to pay £25 each for a 7 day subscription otherwise you only receive alerts that you have an email through the site but cannot read it.

Whilst this service might be acceptable to some it misleads those people who do not feel that they should pay £25 to view properties.

It is difficult to get a true picture of just how many properties are current.

Use sites like Gumtree or Craigslist in the first instance, they are FREE.

[bobbins]

I had a look at your site.

I wonder, when accepting reviews, what steps do you take to ensure that the reviews are from a) real customers, and b) that those customers leaving reviews are sane.

I run a business which was the victim of fake reviews left by my competitors, and also one of our customers was insane and was causing all sorts of trouble for us.

The problem was that the review sites made money from the traffic they got but weren't too keen on validating the reviews. All but one of the review sites were good enough to take down the false reviews, but I had to have the one which didn't shut down. What steps do you take to protect yourself from this type of problem?

[Fugley]

Our first and foremost concern is to verify the accuracy of both good and bad reviews.

If we receive an adverse review we give the business concerned a right to post a reply.

We use a number of tools to verify that a posting neither a fake testimonial nor a malicious complaint.

As you say most gripe sites exist to create traffic to expose their visitors to ads., you will notice that our site does not even have googleads showing.

Again, unlike most sites we will actively pursue scamsters and publish critical articles about businesses across the web. One recent scam we identified resulted in 178 ads advertising motorbikes for sale on just one site. Prior to our nose poking in we reckon the team netted around £250k in Canada alone.

I have a threat of libel proceedings sitting on my desk from accompany. What are the complaints? visit the site and look at BIP. We are not withdrawing what is written, we have some 35 similar complaints. It is however, a demonstration, that we are more interested in the public not getting stung than us making revenues.

If you have any other query by all me email me direct.

[montyzuma]

I use flatmateclick and a few other and have no problem with them. and i certainly dont pay £25 every 7 days. the advantage of them is that they are specialising in one thing flat rental plus when/if you have to pay for something you dont get anything like as many scammers. unlike gumtree/craigs list et all.
if gumtree charges 50p an ad I bet you'd see all the scammers etc disappear to free ad sites.