Yelp Supports Review Extortion - Please Help HN
We filed a report with the local police, FBI, IC3, and ultimately hired a top law firm to pursue a case against the individual. Ultimately, all of the platforms they wrote the reviews on (Ie. TrustPilot, Sitejabber, BBB, GlassDoor, Bluebird, GoogleMyBusiness, UpCity, and more) took them down except for two: Yelp! and Pissed Consumer. The second of which was demanding money each month.
Despite providing Yelp! all of the evidence, police reports, and other material about this attack on our business they still kept nearly every review live and only hid most of them while keeping others live - the only reviews now displayed, since they also hid our real reviews accumulated years ago.
Not only were all these reviews fake, but the person responsible for writing them we discovered writes thousands of fake reviews on their platform that are presumably also published.
A new paradigm is needed of responsible review platforms and hopefully AI can solve this. Businesses are being criminally attacked by these review monopolies and we need new solutions to prevent this.
We please ask for help from the HN community to put pressure on Yelp! to stop these unethical practices and have measures in place to prevent fake reviews, as they are clearly incentivized to keep them since it simulates user activity and as you can imagine, this has caused us a sublime level of terror and a deep depression this year as we watched everything we worked to create upended by one corporation's lack of incentives to police themselves.