Better Business Bureau 20/20 Investigation

What Hacker News said

Recommends rkalla · 2011-08 · on “My experience with a 'negative review' scammer.”

For anyone else interested in this topic (or doubtful about the claim) 20/20 did an cover story on this: [this video]

Recommends aestra · 2014-01 · on “Court to Yelp: Reveal names of negative reviewers”

Hey, that's the BBB we are talking about here. [this video] Watch the whole video if you haven't seen it before.

Cites cdr · 2010-12 · on “Is the Better Business Bureau a protection racket?”

The BBB is a hugely profitable enterprise with a huge payroll. I'm not sure they're even classified as a non-profit. The executives of the BBB make hundreds of thousands a year, according to 20/20: [this video]

Cites rkalla · 2011-09 · on “Lone Yelp review dogs business owner”

For those that haven't seen it, this is exactly how the Better Business Bureau (BBB) operates as well, here is a 20/20 investigation look at it: [this video]

Cites rkalla · 2011-10 · on “FeeFighters Loses BBB Accreditation Over Investigative Blog Post”

For anyone on the fence about the claims, 20/20 did an investigation[1] of the BBB and found exactly the same thing. They worked with companies with complaints against them and low ratings that were called by BBB representatives asking them to re-up their registrations. Without much coaxing the BBB agents clarified that the ratings could be "reinstated" or "take care of" if the signup process was completed. Once the businesses did that, in every case, the scores were re-adjusted to A or A+ for those companies. Conversely, companies that didn't re-up would have all their past complaints re-instated on their review page and scores drop to C/D/F levels. Not unlike the Yelp stuff we saw going on

Cites tonio09 · 2011-12 · on “College: The biggest scam we'll ever buy”

I think college is like better business bureau. A scam. You can learn everything you want yourself for free, instead of going to a college and pay an enormous amount of money for it. Especially now with the Internet, most materials you find online are multiple times better quality than what you get at college. Most graduates need to receive considerable additional training when they join a company. Bottom line is: You don't go to college to learn; you go to college to get a paper certificate that you can show to others. It's the problem of signalling and unfortunately, there's no easy solution for it. Colleges profit from the information imbalance and lack of trust in the job market. Some pe

Cites aestra · 2014-01 · on “Square thinks I don’t exist”

They just have to pay the BBB tax to remove it. [this video] That's the shakedown the GP was referring to. The BBB is a scam.