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Small Businesses Face a New Threat: Pay Up or Be Flooded With Bad Reviews (nytimes.com) 46

Posted by msmash from the pay-to-not-play dept.
Scammers are extorting small businesses worldwide by threatening to flood their Google Maps profiles with fake one-star reviews or demanding payment to remove reviews already posted, according to The New York Times. Fraudsters target service businesses dependent on online ratings -- movers, roofers, contractors -- demanding hundreds of dollars per incident. The Times story documents many cases, including of one Los Angeles contractor Natalia Piper, who paid $250 to multiple scammers after her rating plummeted from 5.0 to 3.6 stars.

Industry watchdog Fake Review Watch documented over 150 affected businesses globally. The scammers typically operate from Pakistan and Bangladesh using WhatsApp to contact victims. Google removes most fraudulent content but offers no direct support channel for targeted businesses.

Small Businesses Face a New Threat: Pay Up or Be Flooded With Bad Reviews More | Reply

Small Businesses Face a New Threat: Pay Up or Be Flooded With Bad Reviews

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  • sue google (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11, 2025 @06:18PM (#65654692)

    If Google refuses to remove the bogus reviews then Google needs to be taken to court. If you have evidence that someone is trying to extort you over reviews it should be a no-brainer for Google to take those down. If Google refuses to take down extortion reviews then Google is complicit. Sue them, see what happens, Not like you have much to lose.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Except for all the time you'll waste trying to find an attorney to take your case.

    • If Google refuses to remove the bogus reviews then Google needs to be taken to court.

      GLWT

      If Google refuses to take down extortion reviews then Google is complicit.

      True. Now, how deep are your pockets?

    • The damage is already done by then, and google's data gets scraped by numerous subsidiary sites that may not update their records; the bad reviews live forever as echoes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      If people can just sue against negative reviews, reviews are worthless. You can sue about wrong claims, but 1/5 stars is 1/5 stars and if a company can sue them away, the customer can't use the star rating to estimate how good products of the company are.

    • Re:Mob enablement technology (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Thursday September 11, 2025 @06:21PM (#65654704)

      It's the free market speaking!

    • "Nice business you got there. It would be too bad if 2000 bad reviews happened to it"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by glitch! ( 57276 )

        Too many bad reviews would be suspect. Who would believe so many were truthful and still do business with them, and then add to the bad reviews? Do we see a thousand "I saw their 1.3 star rating, but I figured I would give them a try anyway, and damn if they took my money and make everything worse."

        Maybe if a scam is a huge operation that gets its victims lined up in a tiny time frame, the complaints can be numerous and quick. But a real business will have reviews that are steady and not just look like a fa

  • For thousands of years we lived in small groups. If you talked smack about someone, it got back to them. We are not prepared for people thousands of miles away to libel us.
    The only way to keep this from happening is to make it prohibitively expensive to pull this kind of nonsense- either via money or reputation.

    • Is "the only way to X is Y" ever true?

    • As the other guy suggests - there are better ways. One is to trust neighbours over strangers.

      So you have a browser plugjn or AI tool to review the reviews.

      One heuristics is that eviews by a friend, or a friend of a friend (FoF), or a FoFoFoF.. get more credence the closer they are to you. Or the more their tastes match yours.

      Of course, this requires some way to authenticate each review. But that could be as simple as a byline at the foot of each review. An identifier, followed by a digitally signed message

      • These solutions are all very clever, but they are far beyond what most people can handle or implement. Unless they are baked into the browser by google, who will not help, they will not happen. So we are back to simple solutions like verify by id or raise the malfeasance cost through pay to review. I wish we could do something similar to what you suggest but feel rather pessimistic about it.

      • One is to trust neighbours over strangers.

        These reviews were likely posted from an overseas IP address. Google could do a lot more to just never post the reviews in the first place. Of course, international travel exists. But if a small town restaurant suddenly gets a dozen reviews from Bangladesh, Google should be able to handle that.

        At one time, Google was at the forefront of winning cat and mouse games like keyword stuffing and search rank manipulation. Online reviews are similar in a lot of ways. The value of their services depends on qu

  • As if anyone would notice (Score:5, Informative)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Thursday September 11, 2025 @06:38PM (#65654740) Homepage

    Most reviews on Google and Yelp are negative anyway. It's something most major retailers found out awhile ago, that people are generally only motivated to leave a review when they're pissed off enough to do so, so you have to offer a carrot (usually free stuff) to encourage customers who did have a good experience to leave positive reviews. Some car dealerships are even kind of pushy about asking that you leave a positive review for them.

    South Park was way ahead of the game here and hilariously nailed it almost a decade ago. "The Yelper Special" [youtube.com] (Also, it's South Park, so probably NSFW or anyone who doesn't want to hear a song about "Boogers and Cum", or anyone who doesn't want anyone around them to know they're listening to a song about "Boogers and Cum".)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Most reviews on Google and Yelp are negative anyway. It's something most major retailers found out awhile ago, that people are generally only motivated to leave a review when they're pissed off enough to do so, so you have to offer a carrot (usually free stuff) to encourage customers who did have a good experience to leave positive reviews. Some car dealerships are even kind of pushy about asking that you leave a positive review for them.

      I think businesses have learned the hard way about being too pushy about reviews, at least here in the UK. British people will generally do a "1 star because they kept bothering me to do a review" in response to repeated "rate us rate us rate us rate us rate us rate us" spam.

      However the review companies are in on the scam. They're the ones threatening to "highlight" negative reviews unless business pay up. Its where Yelp, TripAdvisor, et al. make their money. It's Mafia style standover tactics "that's a

      • However the review companies are in on the scam. They're the ones threatening to "highlight" negative reviews unless business pay up. Its where Yelp, TripAdvisor, et al. make their money. It's Mafia style standover tactics "that's a nice restaurant you have there

        The BBB pioneered this though I'm sure there are others that came before.

        I don't believe Google is on the extortion list because good data has more value to them than the money they could squeeze from businesses. They don't just have a "review site" but maps and navigation. And their reviews are built into a general search engine so they get their revenue from the initial searches.

  • Train consumers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Thursday September 11, 2025 @06:52PM (#65654772)

    Most people are motivated to leave a review because they want to bitch about something. So most will leave negative reviews.

    So how do you find good businesses? Ignore negative reviews. Look for positive reviews.

    Positive reviews are rare. A business really has to be on top of things to inspire someone to leave a positive review. So look for those.

    Of course, then you have the problem of fake positive reviews. But only the business has a motivation for leaving those and they're usually easy to spot.

    • Not the case on Amazon. There, sellers offering free stuff or vouchers or discounts for 5 star reviews are rampant. So for any product or seller you get a ton of reviews like 'I've bought this electric appliance and they sent me the actual thing I've paid for! And when I've plugged it in it didn't blow up in my face! And seems to be sort of working! Brilliant, five stars, would buy again!'. Negative reviews there are better indicators because they mean there's been a genuine fuckup by the seller, whereas 5

      • My post was about reviews of businesses, which was the topic covered by the article, not reviews of products.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        That depends on the product. In some cases the product is perfectly good, but the reviewer doesn't understand how to use it and apparently didn't RTFM.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      No, you ignore the 1 star and 5 star reviews.

      Look at the 2/3/4 start reviews. Because fake reviews are always leaving 1 and 5 star reviews, humans really are the only ones doing 2/3/4 stars and thus those are the ones you should read. The 4 stars will likely highlight the big imperfections and the 2 stars showing there might be something worthwhile.

  • Reviews should be given by verified customers and these tactics certainly diminish the good and bad reviews consumers like me have given over the years.

  • It's equally easy to create fake good and fake bad reviews these days. That makes all reviews pointless.

    One of many examples are film ratings. IMDB is owned by Amazon. Rotten Tomatoes is owned by Comcast and Warner Bros. Go to any of those public reviews and you'll see glowing stars across all titles.

    Google for a film review, and you'll see people's ratings, usually 3 points out of 5 lower.

  • Maybe every reviewer should themselves be reviewed. Personal trust score

  • Contact Google ..... ow wait ..... (Score:3)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Thursday September 11, 2025 @08:36PM (#65654916)

    Google won't do shit about these kinds of abuses.

  • Haven't bothered with those reviews since way before the pay for review Amazon stuff
  • In Germany, any company can get its online reviews purged of everything that isn't positive, simply by paying some lawyer a hundred bucks or so. They'll tell Google that each and every undesired review is fraudulent. They'll even go so far as to claim, against evidence to the contrary, that whoever posted the review was never a customer. Google will contact all the reviewers and ask for proof. In front of that law that makes this possible, you're guilty by default. It's on you, the reviewer, to prove your i
  • Put a banner or disclosure on the front page of your website with a link to the actual threat. If everyone responds that way, it will negate the effect.
    • It wouldn't work. People won't even open the listing of a business with a poor rating, let alone click through to their website. If you're looking for a restaurant in the area -- if you aren't already filtering by 4.5 stars and up -- would you not first look at the ones with the best ratings?
  • At least once a month, someone would email/come-in to offer their services of pumping up google/yelp/etc scores (because they want to show off their handiwork, they would always point me to previous/current clients, illuminating which of my competitors were less-than-honest business people. Although, it was usually pretty obvious anyway). Basically, a cottage industry where the only overhead is time (and maybe $20 a month for a vpn).

    One especially oily guy came in a few times offering his wares, and would
  • Saw this with my cafe, people were posting what, to me, were obviously fake reviews, because they said they came in last week but posted old social media photos with plants we no longer had, and mentioned dishes they ordered that hadn't been on the menu for over a year. Increasingly they only gave 3 stars, so I guess the main goal was to build up a reputation for that profile without causing any obvious red flags. I tried reporting the reviews a couple of times, but the only options Google gives are basica

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