Baedal Minjok cracks down on false restaurant reviews

Baedal Minjok's campaign poster against false restaurant reviews / Courtesy of Woowa Brothers

By Kim Jae-heun

Woowa Brothers, operator of the country's largest online food delivery platform Baedal Minjok, has blocked 114,054 fake restaurant reviews utilizing various technical tools including real-time monitoring and artificial intelligence, the company said on Monday. This has resulted in the number of suspected misleading reviews decreasing by more than 60 percent over the past year.

Previously, Baemin had manually blocked fake reviews reported by restaurant owners and customers. However, in November 2020, it adopted a monitoring system to monitor and analyze at restaurant reviews around the clock and analyze them before taking action.

When a review is suspected of being fake, the system automatically limits its exposure to customers. Last June, Baemin started restricting restaurant owners from leaving favorable comments for their businesses too.

Baemin is also taking legal action and warning those leaving fake reviews on the platform. Currently, investigations are underway with six cases and the company sent warnings to 34 restaurants. Last May, one restaurant was punished for fabricating reviews.

There are marketing agencies that make fake reviews in favor of their customer's restaurants and Baemin has been warning them to stop such illegal activity. If they ignore Baemin's advance notice, the company said it will sue them.

“We are taking stern actions against fake restaurant reviews to create a trustworthy platform. As a result, we have blocked almost all of the fake reviews recently,” a Woowa Brothers official said. “We will continue to cope with fake comments faster and more effectively utilizing our advanced AI monitoring system.”