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Extortion & Review Manipulation
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I'm a business owner with 20 five star reviews on Yelp.
Yelp has called me up to 3 times a day wanting me to pay up to $2,000.00 a month to advertise with them. They are always very aggressive and even threatening with their calls.
Every time I refused to pay them, they removed some of my 5 star reviews and put them in the "hidden" filtered page which most people don't even know exists.
Yelp has called me several times saying that if I payed them, they would stop removing my reviews and the more I payed them...the more good reviews that they will restore.
They also said that if I signed a 1 year contract @ $2,000.00 a month, they would make sure I wouldn't get any bad 1 star reviews.
I refused and now 18 of my 5 star reviews have been removed and two 1 star reviews suddenly appeared from someone I've never met or done business with.
Yelp calls the next day after the fake reviews were posted and said they'll take them away if I pay them. I refuse and the rep yells at me and threatens that I'll never be 5 star rated again.
Yelp has removed me from their search results for weeks at a time. they've also removed my company info, owner bio, place of business, pictures, etc. as a harassment tactic. I have to keep replacing the info.
Yelp has put fake company names so people would think I was operating under those names as an alias.
As part of Yelps harassment, all of the people that left me good reviews have been blacklisted by yelp and every single one of their reviews (that they left other businesses) have been removed or filtered out and Yelp continues to filter out further reviews from those customers.
I tell Yelp not to call me and they still do, hoping I'll give in like so many other businesses.... I will never give in to Yelp's extortion.
Yelp have over 2,100 complaints filed with the FTC for extortion of small businesses and review manipulation.
Yelp has almost 13,000 bad reviews on their own site (including the ones they remove completely and their 1 star reviws that they filter out.
I advise people to read Yelp's Filtered "not recommended" reviews.
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