Scammers at Ciao.com
@faithnomoread (58)
United States
May 24, 2009 11:18pm CST
I have been a verteran at Ciao.com and over that lest 8 months or so there has been a plague of scammers, churners, spammers and plagiarists. Ciao.com is a consumer product review site where people write reviews about products that they OWN. It is not an editorial product review site where people research an item and write a professional review sbout what the product doees and its description. At a consumer product review site we write our personal opinions and experiences about products we own, have owned or at least use. Ciao.com is a fluent English speaking site that reviews producst for fluent English speaking people. The main problem is places like here where people can come and put their referrals links and then 10's of thousands of non-English speaking people come and since they can't sapeak English they will either copy someone elses review from a different site or even Ciao itself. Most of the time they will have 50 cell phone reviews and I don't know anyone that has ever owned more than a few phones before. Especially not in the countries where these people are writing from. We try to report these people, but there are so many of them flooding in everyday that we can't keep up. These people take the credit away from real writers and make our site look bad. There are so many other review sites that I belong to that bad mouth Ciao so bad and Ciao is my home so it hurts my feelings at times. So many people have called me racist because I say these things, btu me being racist is not a possiblity. Most of the people who I have ever loved in my life were not my color or race. I love all people, btu I am not going to a webiste that is for Indonesians and use a translator so I can try to exploit money out of their site or country. I could do that easy, btu I have a conscious. I keep getting these sob stories about how poor they are and I don't want to hear it. I am ghetto poor and have been my whole life, but I am not going to use some site just to try to milk money from. These people will end up ruining Ciao if something is not done about it. The good news is that last month they banned many of these countries from using Ciao. That bad thing is that people can use proxy if they know how to get around that. It sucks that these countires are banned because there are good writers from each of these countries, but only like 1/10,000 are not scams. I have heard that next month Ciao has a surprise for us that will dramatically change all of us and I hope so. Ciao staff can not weed through every single review they send to whatever companies they sell the reviews to and so alot of these crap reviews get through and eventually the companies are going to get tired of it and Ciao is going to go under. Ciao referrals are meant for and should only be given to people you know and your friends not publicly advertised on places like here. Any Ciao people here? What do you think?
2 responses
@rosdimy (3926)
• Malaysia
27 May 09
Some of the points you mentioned have been discussed before but I can understand your frustration. My country has been banned because of the activities of irresponsible users. I never make any review on Ciao even though I was a member because I had nothing relevant to the US market to review on.
Ideally individual accounts should be banned instead of blocking whole countries. The second option is easier to implement but sites like Ciao may lose the input from good writers. There were sites which used to ban individual accounts based on details like name and online banking accounts like PayPal.
The use of proxy servers can be detected so it may not be a big issue.
Maybe there should be some form of test and/or links to online writings done by the applicants. They may be in blogs or forums like myLot. One research site make it a requirement for applicants to send in two articles written by them. The last vetting process is completing a written task within a stipulated time. This may be a better approach, because only serious writers would be prepared to go through the whole process.
all the best in your reviews,
rosdimy
rosdimy@faithnomoread (58)
• United States
27 May 09
Well, the things is they tried individually banning accounts, but there are tens of thousands of people needing to be banned with very limited staff, and the larger% of people from these countries are scammers so they don't have the time or manpower to ban that many people. I can get into any site through proxy and I gaurantee they won't detect me. You can review a product if you have used and I am sure people from your country use products we use so it doesn't matter where you are from. I doubt they would ever lose Paypal. I have actually suggested a test before, but like I said they don't have the manpower to grade that many tests and I wouldn't trust a software program to grade the tests as people will find a way to get around it. Thanks for your input though.
@gitfiddleplayer (10362)
• United States
18 Aug 09
I was going to join them because friends of mine who write for Associated Content also wrote for Ciao, but then a small wave of complaints started coming back about the site and now I'm not sure I want to join. I've heard more bad things than good so I just might have to skip this site and stick with what I know.
@faithnomoread (58)
• United States
18 Aug 09
Ah, it's closed now. It was probably my favorite place and there were those of us who made it a great place, but 90% of the problem was the people who came there from here. I am not blaming Mylot directly and like this place a bit, but it just turned out that way.
