Scammers bombard restaurants with fake one-star reviews
By Beccah Hendrickson
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PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — A restaurant review scheme is targeting several Philadelphia businesses and bringing down their online ratings.
At least eight Philadelphia restaurants found dozens of fake one-star reviews on Google last week, potentially impacting their bottom line.
The scam immediately brought down the ratings of all those restaurants and sent owners scrambling to take down the fraudulent reviews.
“We maybe get one or two reviews every few weeks,” explained Nicholas Bazik, the owner of Provenance. “We went from 4.8 to 3.9 overnight.”
He was shocked to find 39 new one star reviews on Thursday morning on Google. Then he started reading them.
“The pizza was soggy or whatever, when we don’t serve pizza, or the curry was watery when we don’t do curry. That was very telling that they’re all fake,” he said.
He also quickly learned he wasn’t the only victim.
At least eight Philadelphia restaurants were targeted, including Ambra and Southwark in Queen Village and Mish Mish in South Philadelphia.
“I turned to my wife and I was like, ‘I think we’re being cyber attacked right now,'” said Alex Tufik, the owner of Mish Mish.
Alex Tufik found the exact same 39 one-star reviews on Friday.
“I saw the review mentioned pasta, which we don’t serve at Mish Mish, we’ve never served pasta at Mish Mish,” he said.
As he kept scrolling, he saw a final post that read, “My WhatsApp number are in my profile picture. You should contact me so that we can remove all these one-star reviews.”
He didn’t message the number, which traces to another country. Instead, he tried to contact Google.
“It’s a really scary process and a really scary time when you’re a business owner and every dollar matters, every day counts,” he said.
While several of the restaurants say the reviews are slowly being taken down, they worry about customers overlooking their businesses because of this scam.
“We don’t have the resources to combat this, and there’s no contact page on Google for us to be like, ‘Hey, this is obviously fraudulent, can you take it down?” said Bazik.
The owner of Mish Mish says when he reached out to his Instagram followers about what happened, they flooded his Google reviews with positivity, helping bring back his rating.
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