This is the best summary I could come up with:

Since 2012, Yelp has caught nearly 5,000 businesses engaging in shady tactics, like paying customers for favorable ratings or hiring people to write phony reviews.

Yelp is releasing a new index that tracks every U.S establishment it’s ever caught engaging in “suspicious” activity to influence its reviews.

Yelp places temporary alerts on businesses’ pages when it discovers fake reviews, and regularly releases transparency reports detailing its moderation efforts.

“We'd love to get to a place where this new index develops into a regular resource for others, whether it's FTC, consumers, regulators or other sites,” Malik tells Engadget.

But she’s also quick to point out that the index is also meant to help Yelp users make “educated decisions” about where to spend their money.

While you may not think much about visiting a coffee shop with a history of paying people to leave positive Yelp reviews, your feelings may be very different if you’re looking for a contractor to remodel your home, or for a daycare or moving company (all of which appear in the index).

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