First it's really weird about imgur and vpn, I use around five different vpns and they all work fine with imgur. In fact, I upload directly to imgur using vpns. But I guess some are blocked? Can you tell me which ones if it's not a secret?
"other than the ad for the paid review service which is both unsurprising and pretty weak and not really how I think this gets marketed"
Well how do you think this gets marketed? Do you have another example to cite? This has some evidence to it.
There are more screenshots of the service advertised. At some point the review seller would only take orders from someone who would be vouched for by another buyer of reviews.
"would be nice if TER maintained a Wall of Shame page where proven fake reviewers are listed"
But why? It doesn't accomplish anything.
The real easy question here is whom does the practice hurt and whom does it help?
It hurts only one entity - the clients.
It helps both kgirls and review sellers.
So what does the wall of shame solve? It doesn't prevent a provider buying reviews and it doesn't prevent a seller of reviews from keeping on selling it.
Now, on the other hand, if ter actually would remove the profile of those who paid for those reviews, then other review buyers would have a deterrent
"but a month or so back I read a news story about the fake reviews associated with the Bolliwood film industry. Some of the main players admitted to generating something like 80% plus reviews. I don't think it's that bad here. I personally expect that I see more fake reviews on Amazon than here. "
This is pretty irrelevant but you keep on insisting on bringing this in.
Normalizing a practice that is inherently bad, is pretty disgusting.
You're doing the equivalent of, let's say the problem is political corruption in the US. You say oh but in many other countries there is even higher corruption rates. So? Why does it matter? Does it somehow invalidate the problem of corruption in the US? Focus on the problem at hand.
You're employing whataboutism here. The amount of fake reviews in bollywood or Amazon is irrelevant to kgirls buying this fake review service in context of TER. This is clearly against ter terms of service.
From all posts I've read, not a single addressed the elephant in the room -the culpability of kgirls.
Wall of shame for kgirls would work a lot better than Wall of shame for fake reviewers imo. Although I suspect some may just rebrand and considering how hard it is to get ter to merge profiles it will be still be challenging.
Still, it is interesting that everyone avoids this. There would be less fake reviews if kgirls didn't buy them or want them. It's pretty clear. So why only suggest a wall of shame for reviewers and not, you know, providers who buy these reviews and keep the review sellers in biz?