Where is the fraud? The restaurant must have agreed to the commission Yelp is asking for if the restaurant owes it to Yelp.
Restaurants, begrudgingly: fine
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Yelp, to users: click here to order through Grubhub
Yelp, to customers: or just use the restaurant’s phone number to order yourself. [shows you a number that isn’t the restaurant’s]
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Yelp is effectively telling users that a number belongs to the restaurant when it doesn’t. I’m sure yelp’s lawyers would say they aren’t actually telling any users that the restaurant’s number belongs to the restaurant, but come on. It’s clear that the intent is to mislead.
Is this true? Or is the agreement to pay commission or a fee for any calls coming from Yelp’s website or app?
I’m just saying people are throwing out terms like prison and fraud, and in the legal world, those words have specifics meanings.
No, you're over-generalizing my claim. My claim is that it's rare for large companies (with established legal counsel) to approve of illegal policy changes when those changes are very public and likely to be noticed.
Something like this though was almost certainly not one of those gambles.