91av

Once seen as a triumph, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has proved susceptible to dubious deals

USER reviews have generally been good for Squibble, an app created by Canadian software firm . Last month, for example, a post on the website MacRumours complimented its “great graphics” and “addictive gameplay”. “I just tried the best game from the appstore!” wrote a Squibble fan on another site.

Glowing praise, indeed. But the sheen comes off the reviews when you find out that MassHabit appears to have paid for some of them. In a job advert placed last month on Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing website run by Amazon, a MassHabit employee offered people 50 cents to write positive reviews of Squibble that mentioned specific sound bites, including the phrases quoted. Twenty of the tasks were completed, says MassHabit employee Eric Roy, who describes his advert as “an experiment in outsourcing promotion”.

It’s certainly an intriguing use of Mechanical Turk. Yet deceptive job adverts like this can fool both consumers and workers. A 91av investigation shows a number of questionable tasks being advertised on the website, from following Twitter feeds and signing up to dating agencies, to websites trying to defraud workers.

When asked, Amazon said it is aware of the problem, and that it takes steps to rein in abuse on the site. But critics say it could be doing much more. “It is relatively easy to identify the bad actors,” says Dahn Tamir at Knewton, a New York-based education company that uses Mechanical Turk. Yet deceptive jobs continue to be posted, he says.

Half a million workers in 190 countries have registered with the site to carry out minor tasks for small amounts of money. It has been heralded as a triumph of globalisation: an easy-to-use system that lets companies outsource tasks quickly and at minimal cost. Yet it also opens the way for deception.

Over the course of four weeks observing the site, 91av spotted many such tasks. Adverts from individuals and companies offering a few cents to anyone willing to follow them on Twitter or “Like” their Facebook page – tasks which violate the terms of service of both social networks – appear several times a week.

Workers were also asked to create accounts at Gmail and other web-based email services. The jobs require that the username and password be handed to the employers, who may then use the accounts to send spam.

In an advert posted last month, an advertiser calling himself Matthew Allen – Amazon does not enforce the use of real names on the site – offered $20 in exchange for filling in a credit report survey at a site run by Experian, a financial information company based in Costa Mesa, California. Experian pays an undisclosed amount to websites that bring in potential new customers, so the advertiser would have benefited from workers completing the task.

But anyone who did so probably went unpaid, as the advert contained a bug, perhaps inserted deliberately, that prevented users from submitting evidence that they had completed the task. An Experian spokesperson said they had not been aware of the Mechanical Turk job until shown it by 91av and described it as a “non-compliant marketing campaign” that the company had now terminated links with.

This isn’t the only case of an advertiser trying to generate income by creating fake leads for companies. 91av also saw adverts offering several dollars to workers who sign up at the dating website , and auction site . Both companies operate marketing schemes similar to that run by Experian and say that they did not place the adverts themselves.

Workers on Mechanical Turk are able to flag such deceptive ads, and Amazon says that company staff remove them within minutes. While 91av was monitoring the site, several scam jobs did indeed disappear shortly after being posted. But others stayed live for much longer. Tamir says he has collected data that shows that many questionable tasks remain on the site for hours or even days.

Amazon could stop all such tasks, he says. Last November, he contacted Mechanical Turk and offered to develop software that would weed out most problematic jobs before they were posted. The system, which Tamir says he offered to build free of charge, would look for words and phrases that regularly appear in such posts, just as email filters block messages that mention Viagra. But Amazon was uninterested. “I basically got nowhere,” says Tamir. Amazon declined to comment on the discussion.

Tamir went on to build such a system with Panagiotis Ipeirotis, a computer scientist at New York University who has conducted extensive studies of Mechanical Turk. Ipeirotis is currently using a prototype of the system to monitor the site. He says that the latest results suggest that requests for Facebook friends, fake reviews and other questionable tasks could constitute up to 8 per cent of all jobs advertised. An Amazon spokesperson told 91av that Ipeirotis’s analysis was “inaccurate”, but declined to provide the company’s estimate.

“Requests for Facebook friends and fake reviews could make up 8 per cent of jobs on Mechanical Turk”

For the workers, the existence of the deceptive jobs can be a distraction from the business of trying to earn money. “I reported them but they’ll be back tomorrow in greater numbers,” wrote one worker after flagging up numerous survey-related scams. “I feel like the Spartans fighting the Persians at Thermopylae. You can’t win, you can only hope to thin their numbers.”