On Friday afternoon I came across a great NYTimes article on the now common practice of paying Mechanical Turks to post positive reviews for hotels, venues and restaurants. The article goes on to cite a new Cornell study that roots out “deceptive opinion spam” at 90 percent accuracy simply by using computational linguistic analysis. While this would help with fictitious opinions, it doesn’t solve the fact that there’s a clear shadow economy for the larger review-driven landscape.

In as early as 2009, The East Bay Express accused Yelp of offering to hide negative user reviews for a price. While Yelp wasn’t accused of offering to post fraudulent reviews, the company was suspected of hiding the whole truth. For an organization whose slogan is “real people, real reviews”, that felt like a betrayal.

But even when review sites aren’t accused of slippery dealings, there’s little we can do to police real reviews, because quite honestly, sometimes real people suck. Really. Grifters gonna grift. If people are naive enough to buy the old pig in a poke without doing some research, inspecting the merchandise and using a traceable payment system, then perhaps there should be a Turing test for basic common sense.

While I don’t condone grifting by any means, I do quite like ye olde-timey language of the glim-dropper, the melon drop and the badger game. This new fandangled “social engineering” scam game lacks the same panache. To protect yourself against the pitfalls of the common grift, Wikipedia has an extensive list of confidence tricks. Nevertheless, I find watching the Gangs of New York while simultaneously thumbing through my favorite tome, The Wordsworth Reference Dictionary of Pirates to be an excellent starter.