REVIEW EXTORTION

NPR carried a podcast from their Boston affiliate, WBUR, on this Wednesday’s Morning Edition that immediately caught my ear.?‘Review Extortion’ was an expression I was looking for a couple of months back, but didn’t know it because the phrase had not yet been invented, so I had looked for it in vain.?And then. there it was, crackling out of the NPR live stream courtesy of Texas Public Radio, which comes in loud and clear all the way out here in Puerto Rico (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/corby-kummer-straight-up=extortion/id923045032?i=1000569811414 ).

Extortion it was indeed to which my friend and colleague in a profession even nobler than my own was being subjected and is still today, but of a sort different from that reported on by NPR.?See my post, Open Season on Doctors in Private Practice.

The New York Times got the ball rolling on this, as it often does, reporting on, of all things, restaurant scams in the Big Apple (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/dining/google-one-star-review-scam-restaurants.html).?Restaurants in the Five Burroughs, Manhattan especially, began receiving threats that, if they did not pay ‘ransom’ to a specified untraceable online account, they would be receiving masses of negative publicity through Google Reviews.?Of course, before restauranteurs had even a moment to ponder these tidings, the negative reviews started coming into their homepages by the bushel.?What to do?? Well, since these five-star-tarnishing complaints of everything from poor service to things in food that were not food were patently absurd, as restaurant staff and many a customer would attest, and since these were Google Reviews/Google Maps, an online service purporting to have a tough policy on frivolous or even downright false and malicious faked reviews, some went to Google, for a spokeswoman for this ’service’ had just intoned indignantly, in a couple of lines on their policy page, not in person (There are apparently no persons working at Google.?At least they are not available for comment, if they do in fact exist): “Our policies clearly state reviews must be based on real experiences, and when we find policy violations, we take swift action ranging from content removal to account suspension and even litigation.”??

Oooyeeezzz!?But the litigation will be brought not by Google but by you and a special Google-suing attorney.?Yes, Virginia, such creatures do exist and they make a lot of money doing it.?Restauranteurs who tried contacting Google reported that they are sort of difficult to contact.?Prepare, if you do get through the telephone answering cascade, to be told that you, not they, must go to each of the offending libelous, if not actually fake AI reviewers.?What if they demand more than the original amount??Google is not interested in ‘What if?’?Oh, and of course you can get a friend or some other kind person to ‘flag’ the bogus reviews, but, it’s just interesting, restauranteurs in NYC and presumably elsewhere have noticed the same thing that doctors and friends in New England have discovered, namely, flagging a Google Review makes not the slightest bit of difference.?The damning review will still be there in the morning, and all the mornings of the world presumably.?

Not confined to NYC, now similar reports are coming in from restaurant proprietors and restaurant associations across the country with Houston, TX, hit perhaps the hardest outside of NYC, LA and SF ( https://www.marketplace.org/2022/08/10/online-review-extortion-scheme-targets-the-restaurant-industry-at-an-unsteady-time/).?

The Federal Trade Commission has started cracking down on online fraud of all sorts, leading some to speculate that Google’s crowing about getting tough on bogus and/or malicious reviews may just be a way of saying, ‘Nothin’ to see here, Mister!’ (https://streetfightmag.com/2022/07/19/review-extortion-reveals-strengths-and-weaknesses-of-local-ecosystem/ | https://www.today.com/food/restaurants/one-star-review-restaurant-extortion-scam-rcna40333). But really, with Google, nothing has changed.?Reputation.CA?chronicles the rise of Google Reviews, offers helpful hints for NOT interacting with the blackmailer, but is just a tad na?ve when it comes to dealing with Google itself.?That apparently is the way Google feels about its customers—don’t engage and do NOT admit error ( https://www.reputation.ca/google-negative-review-extortion/).?

There is hope for change that restauranteurs may observe and bring to Google’s attention, this time ?from the world of medicine.?Though my friend the good doctor still cringes when opening that private practice ?homepage with Google Maps and Google Reviews permanently affixed, another ratings and review site specifically for medical practitioners, Healthgrades (https://www.healthgrades.com/ ), has proven to be an upstanding digital citizen.?Have you ever had the experience of opening you profile page on some website or other and asking yourself, ’Is that actually supposed to be me?’ My friend did, with personal information arranged in a sort of scrambled egg motif.?And not only that, but some of the little friends, both real and AI-generated (or just the product of a demented mind) who had been busy adding their eighteen odd entries to the literally scores and scores of glowing reviews and full-blown testimonials had been busy elsewhere, including on Healthgrades.?Now, it took a little looking, actually a lot of looking come to think, and two good sets of eyes, but there is a Healthgrades Help Center ?(Contact > Help Center >Provider Portal) for doctors, a Help Center that really does help.?My friend was able to set the profile aright and Healthgrades decided beginning in 2021 to ‘freeze’ all bad reviews, presumably putting them in cold storage somewhere, but to publish only good ones.?How about that, sports fans?!?As my mother and yours and everybody else’s used to always say, “If you can’t say something nice about somebody, then just say nothing at all."

--Guy C. Carter ?Copyright August 2022