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Weedmaps Accused of Faking Reviews

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weedmapsAccording to the Los Angeles Times, Weedmaps, the popular search engine for finding strains and dispensaries, may have faked many of its reviews.

The incredibly popular website and app is under scrutiny after the Times alleged that of the 598 businesses they examined, 70 percent had reviews that came from the same IP address. This would insinuate that all of those reviews came from the same location, and maybe even the same person.

The investigation “suggests a large proportion of glowing remarks come from individual users leaving multiple reviews of a single business.”

The investigation started after Weedmaps made the internet addresses of their reviewer’s public.  This oversight allowed the Times to scrape their review database and look for patterns. Once the story broke Weedmaps resumed hiding the location of its reviewers.

Fakespot, a company dedicated to finding false reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp also found that 62 percent of Weedmaps’ reviews had inconsistencies. They also found signs of fake Weedmaps review programs being run out of Cal State Long Beach, USC and UC Irvine.

Chris Beals, President of Weedmaps Media Inc., stated that the service was popular with millennials on college campuses. He also stated that the company would be implementing upgrades in the near future to bring the site up to internet standards.

Weedmaps has been in business for eight years and has over 200 employees.  “It has shred through several technology leaders and only recently beefed up its engineering team,” the Times reports.

Of the top 300 dispensaries on WeedMaps, 43 had more than 100 suspect reviews that came from the same internet location. For most reviews, about one in five reviews looked suspicious. In the most glaring instance, 40 of 53 reviews for a San Diego club came from five IP addresses. Two reviews were identical.

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