Trustpilot, is it just a big scam? 7

It's well known that consumers trust recommendations from peers and other consumers on Trustpilot far more than they trust what companies say about them. Therefore, companies that sell social proof are very powerful and can easily manipulate consumers' thoughts on any brand.

Yelp even recently won a legal settlement, giving it permission to legally manipulate ratings. Yelp and Trustpilot both claim that they don't manipulate the truth, but when you take a closer look at the evidence and the services they sell, it's clear just how manipulative and unreliable they are.
There are many sites online that allow you to write reviews of any business, but the majority of great sites are paid services for businesses that collect product reviews from their e-commerce websites. Company reviews are by invitation only. The rest are shady and unreliable business directory websites like yelp.com.
So, discovering trustpilot.com, it seems that there is finally a useful and transparent evaluation site, this is very far from the observed reality.

Trustpilot may have started well in 2012 when it was only run by a few people, maybe they even had honorable intentions to keep the site honest, we'll never know. But one thing is for sure, even if it was, then their standards went down and all good intentions were left behind in favor of profit. Which is surely why more and more big name companies like AMAZON don't not claim their profile on Trustpilot.

While they have self-proclaimed controls in place to prevent business owners from posting fake reviews of their own business, or multiple reviews from the same IP address, that seems to be the limit of their efforts.

Unethical Practices

The general consensus is that Trustpilot cannot be trusted. They manipulate reviews in favor of customers on their paid plans and remove the majority of negative reviews, falsely inflating their positive ratings.
From my own dealings with them over the years, one can confirm having experienced what would be considered extremely unethical and biased behavior by their so-called compliance team who challenged the common sense and confirms the above consensus.

An example of manipulation of the opinion of a company client of Trustpilot HERETIC SAS (signal-arnaques.com) we wrote a complete article on the misleading practices of this company:

http://shoppydeals.fr/signal-arnaques-la-derive-frauduleuse-d-une-plateforme-communautaire/

They have repeatedly deleted legitimate negative reviews and then refused to reinstate them unless the victims of this business literally delete all negative words from the review, or request strange and generally inaccessible evidence.

Once you remove everything they asked for, they will then refuse to reinstate the review on the grounds that it says nothing about the service you received from said company.

If you mentioned the name of the company or the CEO/owner of the company in your review, they will even use that as an excuse not to post and demand that this information be deleted, even if this information is not personal or private. and is publicly available online.

There is of course no logical reason not to mention the name of the company you are reviewing, since this information is obviously displayed right at the top of the page, since this information is necessary for the Trustpilot site to even work. Of course, if you report this fact to the compliance team, they will simply ignore it.

The compliance team also completely refuses to check facts or review evidence when it is provided, even if it's just clicking on a link and visiting a webpage to verify business trade names. or look at a picture. You definitely get the distinct impression that the compliance team is missing from the brain cell department and probably working out of an Indian scam call center.

Most consumers will be so frustrated with these vexatious and convoluted tactics and mentally challenged call center staff that they will give up, which is clearly Trustpilot's intention.

If a company uses Trustpilot's free service, the situation is reversed, and it seems that they will gladly allow the publication of defamatory or false reviews relentlessly, and will put minimal effort into handling complaints and make the task as difficult as possible. . We had to resort to threats of legal action to get the fraudulent/fake reviews removed.

In fact, if you read the reviews on the site below, business owners claim that TrustPilot even prevents them from reporting defamatory or false reviews.

The only way not to find yourself abused on Trustpilot is to use their paid service, after which you receive preferential treatment and are allowed to abuse the system instead.

As if that weren't enough, Trustpilot will also allow any company you've reviewed to retaliate by posting malicious and defamatory messages against you personally.
According to Trustpilot's own guidelines, "1.1 You may write a review on Trustpilot about a business if you have had a buying or service experience with that business"
But Trustpilot does not follow these guidelines. If you have a personal webpage or blog, a vindictive business owner can get revenge on you for posting a negative review by posting all the malicious and defamatory lies he likes by linking to your website/blog . Trustpilot won't do anything about it (unless you threaten them with legal action).
It is therefore very risky to post reviews using your own identity.

So what does this mean for the consumer?

Unfortunately, since Trustpilot allows reviews to be manipulated, this means that the scores and ratings you see for any business may not be reliable, so if in doubt you should not rely on this alone. as your only source.

They have processes in place to prevent the same person from leaving multiple reviews under different names, and knowing how to get around this will be beyond the ability of the average person who isn't very computer savvy. This therefore means that false positive reviews are less likely.

One way to verify a business that seems too good to be true is to check other directory sites such as yell.com, yelp.com, freeindex.com, etc. that they may not be watching. Also social media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Companies that have a history of removing negative reviews usually won't allow posts on their Facebook page without moderation, or will quickly remove anything negative, so it's pretty easy to test.

However, no company can delete other people's tweets, so check their timeline and look for specific phrases.