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Comment on Today, a homeless looking man handed me $50 and this noteparent

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" except that he's located in.... New Zealand. Not NYC"

His opening, way to specific, directions is what set off my spidey sense. As per some research that was done a while back (Only link I can find on short notice: http://cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2011/09/23/cornel...) to detect advertising plants, the plants would always try to build a scene of what happened ("I was on the 143 bus heading down Front Street when I saw the catching blue uniforms of the restaurant"), where as the real customers were more about emotions ("I felt ripped off, screw this place"). His attempt to build a scene right off the bat seems to fit this pretty well shrugs.

That article says the fake reviews are for Mechanical Turk -- it's unclear if they were reviews that were actually approved by a scammer, or if the researcher's just said "write me a fake review". There's a huge chance that their synthetic fake reviews don't resemble real deceptive reviews.

Also, the "real" reviews were just pulled from a site, without any research to verify their authenticity.

The article might not be the best (it wasn't the one I read a year or so ago), just a similar article I could find quickly. I don't think the original article was much better though =)

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