How to prevent fraud?

hadoob024

I just joined this startup venture. It's basically a company that's trying to create a general ratings system for products (similar to Amazon, Epinions, etc.). You see a product online, highlight it, right-click and then you can rate the product or search on the product's ratings. They then plan on charging sites to display these ratings (among other revenue avenues).

The two issues I can see are:

1) How to make sure that ratings posted on a website are paid for by the website? If a company wants to post our ratings on their site (for marketing/bragging purposes), they must pay to do so.

2) How to prevent marketing firms from posting fraudulent ratings for hire?

For the second problem, I was thinking of tying the ratings to IP addresses, maybe? Or maybe the MAC address instead? Anyone have any thoughts on either of these two issues?

dagon

depending on your jurisdiction:

you wont have a contract with them so your will have to look at broader civil proceedings:
copyright law
false\misleading advertising laws

how about an api with a key, wont stop some one stealing the output code and faking it, completely.

very difficult, I suspect a lot of 'user' reviews to be fake

hadoob024

Cool. Will definitely research the legal aspects of protection as a method.

how about an api with a key, wont stop some one stealing the output code and faking it, completely.

Can you expand on this a little? How is this set up? Assuming I'm populating a MySQL db or something. Would I use PHP to facilitate this? Something else?

Regarding #2, that's what I was thinking too. I figured that the only preventative measures would require screening out some valid values.

dagon

I would set it up like credit card processors give them a url and a key and then return an xml file so soap\rest can be used.

http///yousite/request.php?key=123456789

you can then check the valid key and serve the data. If they don't pay there monthly fee, disable that key.

hadoob024

Interesting. That sounds like it could work. I wonder if there's a way to include some sort of seal or image or something that's included in the ratings that somehow won't display properly if they don't pay. This probably still won't stop someone who's determined though, right?

dagon

If the image is hosted on your server sure. There's a number of ways to steal 'it' if they really want to (just copy the basics from some other site and add\edit any data they like)

you could have a back link verification, that would show if the data \api call was valid, but that's only useful if any one bothers to click the link.

hadoob024

Hmmmm... That's true. Good food for thought. Will take it all into consideration as I begin planning all of this. Thanks!