🚩 Fake review abuse on our new scraper shows platform needs better safeguards
Yesterday we released our new Semrush Scraper. Within hours, a competitor (as we know now, having investigated it ourselves) used multiple fake accounts to leave more than ten 1-star reviews. Some of the accounts ran the scraper once with deliberately invalid inputs, others didn’t run it at all (more reviews than actual users) and just posted “not working.” or similar reviews to manipulate the public image of our actor and in the end also on our reputation. As a result the rating for this actor dropped significantly on the first day of launch, even though the scraper works as expected.
This shows clear weaknesses in the review system. At the moment, there are 3 key weakness that we would like to point out:
- Users can leave a review without ever running an Actor
- Brand-new accounts can post reviews immediately (primarily free accounts)
- There is no effective prevention against creating multiple fake accounts
Apify has recently added a reply option for developers and a delete option for review authors, which is a step forward, but this case shows the system is still very easy to abuse.
I’ll share screenshots of the reviews so the pattern is visible. This kind of manipulation doesn’t just affect our actor, it undermines the reliability of ratings across the whole Apify store in our opinion.
We hope a support member @Apify Developer Community Manager contacts us soon and our case is resolved quickly, and for the community we hope that the larger flaws in the review system are addressed soon after to make the platform safer for everyone.
This shows clear weaknesses in the review system. At the moment, there are 3 key weakness that we would like to point out:
- Users can leave a review without ever running an Actor
- Brand-new accounts can post reviews immediately (primarily free accounts)
- There is no effective prevention against creating multiple fake accounts
Apify has recently added a reply option for developers and a delete option for review authors, which is a step forward, but this case shows the system is still very easy to abuse.
I’ll share screenshots of the reviews so the pattern is visible. This kind of manipulation doesn’t just affect our actor, it undermines the reliability of ratings across the whole Apify store in our opinion.
We hope a support member @Apify Developer Community Manager contacts us soon and our case is resolved quickly, and for the community we hope that the larger flaws in the review system are addressed soon after to make the platform safer for everyone.
