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Comment by teen | Hacker News Reader

I've seen it first hand. My friend is a veternarian who was working in a very expensive neighborhood in California. Every time he got a 5 star review, it wouldn't display on his Yelp page. A few 1 star reviews did appear though. Yelp would call him and tell him essentially the 5 stars would reappear if he advertised with them. He had no choice but to pay and they all appeared, driving his average back up. How would you propose to prove it? And what would proving accomplish since many folks already believe it?

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You say you have seen it first hand? Isn’t that second hand knowledge your describing?

You ask what would proving it accomplish? It would allow everyone to actually know what’s going on instead of stringing together a bunch of conjecture and anecdotes. It would enable change.

It's trivially easy: link to the page. Put up or shut up. If what you're saying is true, it will be obvious.

These stories are always about "friends" or "relatives", but nobody ever provides the link to the evidence, despite that being the easiest thing in the world to provide.

Specifically, Internet Archive links that show the before/after situation, with reviews appearing that were made before "before" but only appear in "after".

Do you know for sure it was Yelp calling and not some third-party scammer? I have heard there are companies that pull this, and some might pretend to be Yelp but in fact they just create fake reviews and them delete/change them later. (I presume this only works if the target pays "Yelp" over the phone). I am not sure what to believe but like your parent xommentor I am skeptical.

Given the scale at which phone scammers operate these days, and the fact that many of the scammed business owners are likely not savvy to this, it's plausible.

One wonders how profitable it'd be for Yelp to call small, local businesses at scale for shakedown, considering what's on the line reputationally if one or two people know how to record calls.

It's illegal in a lot of states to record calls without notifying the other party.

>>> How would you propose to prove it? And what would proving accomplish since many folks already believe it?

Gather a paper trails. For starters, screenshots of the page + emails and communication with the company.

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