The Host's Reviews Were All Written After Checkout — By Me

I only found it because I went to leave an honest, middling review — the place had been fine, a little off, nothing I could name — and discovered I had, apparently, already reviewed it. Glowingly. Five stars. A warm paragraph in my name, praising the host, the location, the 'safe and welcoming' stay, posted under my account, marked 'verified guest,' dated — I checked twice, three times — the week before I had arrived.

I had not written it. I had never written it. But there it was, my name, my little profile photo, a review I had no memory of and could not have written because it was posted before I'd set foot in the place, praising a stay I hadn't yet had, in words that weren't mine, five stars I hadn't given.

I went cold, and then I did the thing that turned cold into something worse: I read the other reviews. Properly. All of them, the whole glowing wall of them, the reason I'd booked with confidence. And the more I read the more I saw it — the same warmth, the same phrases, 'safe and welcoming,' 'the host thought of everything,' 'we felt completely at ease' — a wall of five-star reviews in the names of many different guests that all, somehow, sounded like one voice, one hand, one writer wearing a hundred names. Verified guests. Real accounts, real photos, real people who had really stayed. And reviews they, like me, I became certain, had never written, posted in their names, praising the host in words that were always, underneath the different names, the same.

Someone was writing the reviews. Not fake accounts — that's the ordinary fraud, the easy one to spot. Real guests' real accounts, hijacked or spoofed or accessed somehow, made to post glowing five-star praise in the guests' own names, dated to their stays, building an unassailable wall of 'verified' trust out of the identities of the actual people who'd walked through the door — most of whom, like me, would never think to check whether they'd left a review they didn't remember leaving, because who checks that, who goes looking for words in their own name they never wrote.