I hadn’t visited Indeed.com for years, but I had a job I wanted to post somewhere, so was seeking job posting sites, and at the same time learned that someone I knew was about to take a job in Portugal at a company called Teleperformance. She sent me a link to a YouTube video about the company, posted by the company itself.
Something about the video seemed suspicious in that “too good to be true” way, so I searched for reviews, and found a page on Indeed.com about Teleperformance. The reviews were indeed horrifying! They are in many languages, and I can only read French and English, but those were enough. It sounded like a nightmare of a job, attracting young people under false pretenses, paying them almost nothing, putting them up in terrible, moldy apartments, making women feel unsafe, making them stay for 9 months in order to get their flight refund…it went on and on.
But there were two other things I noticed. Indeed.com had pinned a positive review to the top of the page. Maybe they are paid to surface positive reviews? Unclear. And it explained a bit too much about the business, as if it were coming from the company itself. However, the other thing I noticed was that all of the positive reviews were completely without specifics.
You can hire bands of freelance reviewers on places like Fiverr to post positive reviews to Yelp, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc. Often these can be easily identified by their lack of specificity. If you removed all the non-specific positive reviews, Teleperformance would be left with just bad-to-terrible reviews.
Defrauding customers on review sites is also illegal. So I have reported the fraud here, but I am guessing that this particular company is not the only one stacking the deck. And they’re doing it with an assist from Indeed.com itself.
Here is where you can report fraud to the FTC. There is an ocean of this stuff, and obviously this report will get drowne in a sea of similar such reports. How can we get integrity back into the internet? Why can’t review sites maintain their integrity? Should we wipe the internet and start again? Sometimes I think we should.
Caterina.net 