Liars, Scumbags, & Satisfied Customers: What to do?

[Joshua Dorkin]

I'm turning to you, our members, for advice on how to handle an ongoing problem that we face here.

Here's the problem:
Not a week goes by where someone joins BiggerPockets and answers a question on the forums, and as part of that solution, recommends some company that does a fantastic job of solving some problem that the OP has.

This would be great if these people were actually doing so because the solution/company is what the poster was looking for.

Unfortunately, these people who are claiming to be "satisfied customers" are almost always either: a) the owner of the company b) an employee of the company c) some other shill of the company. In other words, they are liars who are looking to manipulate others in an attempt to drive business.

I just deleted a post from someone who did just this, but when I visited her profile, found out that the company was, in fact hers. This woman is clearly just stupid and makes our job easy, but we bust the sneaky ones too.

With that in mind . . .

Our ongoing policy has been to remove any post that does this and then ban the user from the site. Our terms require that users disclose their relationships when talking about a company, and these people clearly are in violation of this policy.

That said, I'm wondering if instead of making these people and their posts disappear, we should make examples of them?

While by removing them from the site, we reduce the odds that someone here will work with these dishonest people, I wonder if we'd do more good by calling them out so people would see who they are and be aware of them....

I'm not promising that we'll make any changes to our current policy, but I'd be very curious to take the temperature of our users to see what you think is the best way to handle this.

Thanks, Josh