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Thanks for the warning. To be fair, even big "companies" like yelp.com have been running extortion rackets for years and are still the darlings of the technical press.

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"Darlings of the technical press?" Can you show some examples, please? The ones I've seen have been skeptical, or reported on alleged extortion, such as:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/yelp-sued-for-alleg...

Do you have any more info on how yelp.com has been running "extortion rackets"?

I don't know much about yelp, and don't use it much, but have generally been led to believe that they are a good company (admittedly, by the tech press) so it'll be interesting to hear if you have actual examples of people getting scammed.

I personally don't know of anyone who owns a company that has been apart of any Yelp Extortion, but there has been several cases brought against them.

http://www.google.com/search?aq=0&oq=yelp+exto&sourc...

>A federal judge...dismissed a class-action lawsuit accusing consumer review website Yelp of extortion...Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled last week that the original suit failed to back up small business owners' claims that Yelp was manipulating user reviews to force them to advertise on the site.

It seems that everything is one year old or older, so there is a hope that they don't continue this behavior.

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