Scams, mischief and fraud in the crowd

摘要

User reviews have generally been good for Squibble, an app created by Canadian software firm MassHabit. Last month, for example, a post on the website MacRumours complimented its "great graphics" and "addictive gameplay". "I just tried the best game from the appstore!" wrote a Squibble fan on another site. Glowing praise, indeed. But the sheen comes off the reviews when you find out that MassHabit appears to have paid for some of them. In a job advert placed last month on Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing website run by Amazon, a MassHabit employee offered people 50 cents to write positive reviews of Squibble that mentioned specific sound bites, including the phrases quoted.