When I am out and about in a neighborhood of NYC that I don’t know that well and I get hungry or want a drink, my first instinct is to whip out my phone and enter what I’m looking for into Yelp. Or, if I’m planning dinner or a night out, I’ll turn to the reviews for a sense of what the ambiance is like, and how the food is (if I can’t get in touch with one of my foodie friends). So today is a sad day that exposes around 16% of yelp reviews as fraudulent. I knew that certain retailers (my hair salon included) will offer incentives or service credits if you write a positive review, but I had no idea the number was so high. Yelp tries to screen out the most extreme reviews by filtering them, to conceal potentially fake raves that are just too-positive, or overtly negative reviews that might be planted by a business’s competitors, but fake reviews are sure to slip through the cracks. It’s just a reminder to take what you read online with a grain of salt.