This is not the only company to face such allegations and afaik it's not the first time yelp has been accused either. I think you'll have to base this one on anecdotal stories.
In my experience, almost all stories get bigger in the retelling, especially when you have a grievance, having some hard proof at least helps to give you a baseline assessment of how much of an exaggeration the claims are.
Also, look at the information you've seen about bad practices at Uber recently. I'm aware my next statement is pretty weak reasoning, but if Uber with all its money and talent has these problems out in the open what makes you think Yelp would be that much better at keeping this a secret?
>>What people accuse Yelp of doing is pretty close to racketeering (or is? IANAL) and thus there is a high burden of proof.
Where there is smoke there is likely fire. I am probably not willing to believe it is corporate mandate with the evidence shown, however I can see a Wells Fargo style situation where perverse sales incentives combined with lacking internal controls allows for Sales people and Middle Managers to cause some of these issues that have been reported.
Without proof you may still be innocent in the eyes of the law, but if I was a young lady, I sure wouldn't be anywhere around him alone.
IANAL, but if the call starts out with the standard, "Please note that this call is being recorded for training and quality assurance purposes", or similar, then you are free to record that conversation and it would not be illegal. All parties to the call have been informed that the call is being recorded, and thus no wire tapping laws have been broken. This works for both 1 party and 2 party states as far as I'm aware.
It's probably also not that unusual for Yelp to call a business that plays this announcements to its incoming callers, and actually records them. I can only guess that we haven't seen this evidence because the offended business might have preferred to settle things in private.