How a review ends up on Mafi Wasta — without anyone paying for it, promising it, or pretending it didn't happen.

Receipt, code, identity, moderation. Four steps. No shortcuts.

Every published review on Mafi Wasta has cleared the same four mechanical checkpoints. The order matters — earlier steps cannot be skipped, and no step accepts a paid override. If you want to know whether a review is real, walk through the list.

1. 01

   The transaction happens at the point of sale.

   A customer pays a Mafi Wasta partner business — a restaurant, a clinic, a salon, a mechanic. The business's terminal, POS system, or printed receipt prints (or displays) a unique 9-character transaction code. There is no app to download at this stage, no QR code to scan first. The code is generated the moment money changes hands and is single-use.

   Codes expire 14 days after issue. If a customer waits longer than that, the review window closes and a new transaction is required. We do this so reviews reflect recent experience, not grudges from 2019.

2. 02

   The customer enters the code on the directory.

   The customer opens the directory, finds the business they transacted with, and enters the 9-character code. The code is hashed, matched against the issuing business's transaction ledger, and — if valid — unlocks a review form. The form asks for a 1-to-5 rating, a written comment, and an optional photo. Without a valid code, the form is unreachable. There is no back door.

   In the first nine months after launch, this single mechanism eliminated 94% of the fake-review volume we measured against our own baseline. Not because we got lucky — because the code is a wall that a friend-of-the-owner cannot climb.

3. 03

   The business has already passed identity verification.

   Long before any review is written, the business itself has cleared our 3-step KYC process: a scanned commercial circular (السجل التجاري), a national ID or passport of the owner or legal representative, and an on-site photograph of the storefront with a date-stamped placard. Over 12,400 Lebanese businesses have completed this — and the directory will not list a business that has not.

   A review of a non-existent business is structurally impossible. The review form only exists on the page of a business that has already been verified, on a transaction code that was actually issued.

4. 04

   The review passes moderation — automated, then human.

   The submitted review is screened by our bilingual moderation system in Arabic, French, and English within 90 seconds, then queued for a human moderator who signs off within four hours. Hate speech, personal data, and obvious astroturfing patterns are filtered automatically. Edge cases — a sarcastic Lebanese idiom, a competitor filing a fake complaint, a customer describing a medical outcome — are routed to a human. After sign-off, the review is published and the transaction code is permanently retired.

   A retired code cannot be reused. Once a review is live, the underlying transaction is locked in our audit log with a timestamp and a moderator ID. This log is what the Forbes Middle East and AUB reviewers examined.