How to prevent fraud?

[hadoob024]

I just joined this startup venture.  It's basically a company that's trying to create a general ratings system for products (similar to Amazon, Epinions, etc.).  You see a product online, highlight it, right-click and then you can rate the product or search on the product's ratings.  They then plan on charging sites to display these ratings (among other revenue avenues).

 

The two issues I can see are:

 

1)  How to make sure that ratings posted on a website are paid for by the website?

2)  How to prevent marketing firms from posting fraudulent ratings for hire?

 

For the second problem, I was thinking of tying the ratings to IP addresses, maybe?  Or maybe the MAC address instead?  Anyone have any thoughts on either of these two issues? 

[shlumph]

1)  How to make sure that ratings posted on a website are paid for by the website?

Wait, what? The website is paying itself? Are you trying to say that you have to pay to be able to rate a product? Or are you saying that companies must pay to enable ratings on their product?

 

2)  How to prevent marketing firms from posting fraudulent ratings for hire?

I'm not sure I understand this question either. Posting ratings for hire?

 

Maybe I just need some more coffee, heh.

[hadoob024]

Sorry.  Should've clarified better.  For issue #1, I meant something closer to second comment you made:

 

companies must pay to enable ratings on their product

 

Except that we'll allow ratings of any product.  It's just that if a company wants to post our ratings on their site (for marketing/bragging purposes), they must pay to do so.

 

 

For issue #2, I meant more fraud protection.  If Company A's product is rated lowly by our users, how can we stop them from hiring someone (or some company) to make fraudulent ratings to boost the overall image of their product?

 

Hope that answered your questions (although I'm still recovering from the weekend so who knows )