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As a business owner, there is no worse feeling than seeing a negative review of your business. You work hard to provide great customer service and hope that all of your customers become raving fans. It takes years to build a reputation and trust on Google and other search platforms that help prospective clients feel confident in choosing your business. The fragile ecosystem of Google reviews has become a target of scammers and bad actors with no signs of slowing down. The most recent tactic is to target businesses with positive review profiles that have an overwhelming number of negative reviews, and then demand payment to remove or address these negative comments.
Learn From Superpath's Own Negative Experience!
We just experienced this and documented the process to help other business owners who are hit with these unfortunate attacks. We walk through the entire process, starting with the flood of negative reviews, the demand for payment, and the eventual resolution of the attack.
Your Google Business Profile Is Suddenly Swamped With Tons of Negative Reviews
When reviews are left on your business, Google sends an email to the business owner to alert them of the interaction. When you receive dozens of emails in a short period of time and they are all one-star with comments unrelated to your business, your anxiety level is likely to soar. This is the emotional response the scammers are looking for. The negative reviews are likely to have nothing to do with your business or services, and Google’s system is not yet able to distinguish these and prevent them from being posted.
Examples below include placing an order, location, and paying cash, none of which are offered by the business.
Demand for Ransom and Payment to Remove The Reviews
Within a few hours and over twenty negative reviews we started to see the tone of the reviews change and a demand for payment included in the messages...
"My brother,my WhatsApp number are in my profile DP. You should contact me so that we can remove all these comments..." ~ Google Review Spammer
The poster was requesting for us to connect via WhatsApp and review their profile to ensure a “quick resolution” to assist in removing the negative reviews.
How Should a Small Business Respond to The Negative Review Ransomware and Get the Reviews Removed Quickly
As the negative reviews started to accelerate, our team began to take immediate action. We started to collaborate internally and create awareness that we were under a likely attack of negative reviews. As an open source platform that allows for reviews, both positive and negative, Google has created an ecosystem that allows for feedback on reviews. Every Google profile has the ability to comment on our flag a review for accuracy. We proceeded to work in collaboration to start flagging the negative reviews across multiple accounts, believing that the multiple accounts disputing the reviews would help to escalate their removal quicker.
Luckily our combined efforts were successful and within twenty four hours all of the negative reviews were removed and there were no further attacks.
Can Negative Review Ransomware Be Prevented on Google
Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world and small businesses rely heavily on Google Maps and their review profile to attract new customers. This platform is designed to be open source and easy to use. It’s hard to imagine there are are not safeguard in place that incorporate AI to better understand a business, their services, location and offerings to help identify and filter out fake reviews. In our case, there was zero evidence of these safeguards working to prevent the review. We took proactive action to esclate the fake reviews, but scammers are likely leveraging software to conduct these attacks at scale and prey on less tech savvy business owners.
We were successful in getting the negative reviews removed within a day, which still may have negatively impacted our business and potential opportunities with perspective customers. Superpath has been helping small businesses with digital marketing and Google Business Page optimization for over seventeen years. Contact a digital marketing professional from Superpath to learn more about our marketing services and filling your job board.
