Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
Google removed dozens of bogus one-star reviews from the pages of eight Philadelphia restaurants on Tuesday, hours after The Inquirer published an article detailing how a scammer had placed the reviews and demanded ransom to take them off. The restaurateurs received automated notifications from Google as the bogus reviews were pulled, one by one. The emails said the reviews “appeared to violate our policies.” The restaurants’ Google ratings have recovered, and their online reputations have been restored. The first reviews were posted Thursday, claiming all sorts of hospitality failures, such as “vile” food and “rude” service. The one-star ratings quickly sank the scores of the eight restaurants identified by The Inquirer. On Friday morning, The Inquirer alerted Google to the issue and sought comment about the platform’s often-murky practices of policing comments and removing flagged content. That evening, a Google representative asked The Inquirer to provide the names of affected restaurants and promised to investigate. Google Maps, where the reviews are found, claims 2 billion monthly active users. As the largest review platform, Google ratings are the coin of the realm for the restaurant industry because they create a first impression, said Nicholas Bazik, chef-owner of Provenance, a boutique restaurant in Society Hill. Provenance’s score dropped in several hours from 4.8 on the 5-point scale to 3.9 after more than three dozen one-star reviews were posted by a scammer who demanded money to clean up the mess. “Businesses live and die by these reviews,” said Kay Dean, a private investigator who keeps tabs on the online-review industry on Fake Review Watch, her YouTube channel. For more than five days — with Provenance’s rating wavering near a tepid score of 4 — Bazik feared the long-term impact, despite the restaurant’s being named one of the best new restaurants in America by Bon Appetit. Tuesday night, with Provenance again sporting its vaunted 4.8, he was relieved. One-star reviews were also blasted onto the Google pages of Ambra, Lacroix, Her Place Supper Club, Kissho House, Mish Mish, Palizzi Social Club, and Southwark, dragging down their ratings, as well. The online scammer, based in Pakistan and calling himself Alexander, said he would charge $250 to remove the reviews. This scam — impossible to thwart and difficult to overcome — is part of what Dean describes as a widespread cottage industry based mainly in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, out of the reach of American authorities. The scammers hit small businesses that depend heavily on online reviews, such as contractors, retailers, and restaurants, hoping they will pay a ransom to restore their ratings. Meanwhile, Google and other platforms make it frustrating for business owners to remove the bogus reviews. Business owners may flag spam reviews — as the eight restaurant owners did — but Google offers no way to speak with anyone from the company directly, Dean said. “It’s this black hole and Google’s clearly not on top of the problem.” Dean said a bigger problem is the practice of some businesses’ buying positive reviews, unfairly inflating their reputations. Google did not respond to The Inquirer’s request for information about how it is working to streamline its appeals process and crack down on fraud. The fake-review scam has been around for years and shows no sign of stopping. In its online materials, Google said that in 2024, it removed more than 240 million policy-violating reviews. It also posted what it called “a transparency report,” saying its first line of defense against content that violates its policies is “our advanced machine learning models. These models excel at identifying patterns to help determine if content is authentic or violates any of our policies. As a result, the majority of fake and policy-violating reviews (over 85%) are blocked or removed before anyone actually sees them.” Dean, scoffing at that claim, said review platforms have created such a lax environment that cheating is essentially rewarded and honest businesses are harmed. “These extortionists are constantly making new profiles, and Google’s whack-a-mole approach is a poor solution from a multibillion-dollar company that claims to be on top of this massive problem,” she said. Google, she said, hides behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which largely protects platforms for content that appears on their sites. “The bottom line is that this fraud will continue until Congress reforms Section 230 to hold Google and other review platforms in some way accountable or until people stop using online reviews as reliable information,” she said.
