Deceptive Reviews

  • BPN accepts reviews only from parent subscribers who have no personal connection to the business or school they are recommending, per the Policy on Advertising & Promotion and  BPN's policies for posting reviews. 

  • BPN does not accept reviews of one's own business, or reviews from employees, or reviews posted by friends, colleagues or family members of the business owner. 

  • BPN does not accept reviews that were posted in exchange for any type of favor or compensation (see Compensated and Reciprocal Reviews.)

Posting a review of your own school or business under false pretenses

If we determine that you posted a review of your own business by misrepresenting yourself as a client, we will disable your account, remove all reviews of your business from the website, and we won't accept further posts about your business. If you have paid for a subscription on BPN, your subscription will be canceled and the balance of your subscription will not be refunded  See Removing Reviews from the BPN Website.

Not disclosing your relationship to a school or business you recommended

If we determine that a review was posted by a friend, colleague, employee, or family member who concealed their relationship to the business, we remove the review and notify the poster about BPN policy. Multiple instances of this will result in the poster's subscription being revoked, and the removal of all reviews of the school or business.  BPN will not accept further posts about the business.  See Removing Reviews from the BPN Website.

Examples of deceptive reviews

Unfortunately, reviews are sometimes posted on BPN that are deliberately designed to be misleading in order to conceal a conflict of interest. This is rare on BPN, since all posts are reviewed by a moderator before being published. But deceptive posts do get past us, despite our best efforts. Examples from the past that we've uncovered:

  • The owner of a therapy practice who created multiple parent accounts under false names and used them to post reviews of herself and a number of other therapists in her practice.
  • A therapist who subscribed as a parent under a pseudonym and posted 13 anonymous reviews of herself.
  • The director of a private school who used her parent account to post anonymous positive reviews of her school as well as negative comments about other private school competitors.
  • A tutor who created several fake parent accounts in order to post multiple reviews of herself and other family members who were in the tutoring businesses.
  • A college advisor who posted at least 3 anonymous reviews of herself and recruited her partner, friends and colleagues to also post reviews of her.
  • A children's party performer who subscribed as a parent under a false name and posted a negative review of a competitor.
  • A contractor family with scores of reviews under multiple business names that turned out to be posted by family members and fake parent accounts.
  • A doula who used her parent account to post 10 anonymous reviews of her business.