They're hoping that the restaurants will pay them to stop posting the one-star ratings.
“I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened sooner, I mean, it seems like a pretty smart scam,” Val Cantu, the chef at Californios, told Eater. “Restaurants are so vulnerable to [bad reviews] and not that that’s the end of the world, but those reviews do tend to sway diners and hospitality is at the core of what we do—whenever somebody isn’t happy, we want to fix it.”The scammers seem to be leaving one-star reviews without any text, and posting multiple times for each restaurant.
Google, meanwhile, has been only slightly helpful to those impacted by the scheme. The company helped Greg Lutes of 3rd Cousin get the reviews taken down, but Julianna Yang over at Sons & Daughters had more difficulty with the tech giant. In her initial outreach, Google told her that the reviews didn’t violate any policy issues . And Paterlini simply got an automated response from Google saying that an actual reply could take weeks.
Of course, these are some of the most notable restaurants in the Bay Area, so it’s unlikely that they’ll be greatly affected by the scam. But if smaller restaurants are being targeted as well, it might take a bit more effort for them to come out of the ordeal unscathed.
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