Scammers blackmail small businesses with fake Google reviews • FRANCE 24 English

Scammers blackmail small businesses with fake Google reviews • FRANCE 24 English

[Music] How do you choose your handyman or dentist or restaurant? Chances are you look at Google reviews. But can you trust them? Especially now that AI is making it easier than ever to make fake reviews. In breast, northwest France, estate agents like the one behind me are being blackmailed. Scammers are posting fake one-star reviews and asking for money to take them down again. We couldn’t believe it. We wondered why our business was being attacked for no reason. I led them to think I would pay them and they removed five or six posts, but I obviously didn’t pay, so they put them right back up. Across town, Morgan Gedire also has a flood of one-star reviews from people she’s never heard of. I scrolled and scrolled. There were 15 of them. I was stunned. It’s like they’re real. anyone would say they’re real reviews. It’s not just one sentence. It’s a whole block of text. But it’s not just this corner of France. US investigator Keenan says the same group of Bangladeshi scammers harassing these estate agents is going after companies in Paris, Madrid, and Morca as well. I think what the public doesn’t realize, Peter, is that there’s just this whole underworld of nefarious activity occurring that you don’t see on Google. And this includes just an ocean of fake positive reviews, fake negative reviews, and even extortion. Online, the scammers post about their experience in digital marketing, SEO, and yes, even providing Google reviews. It’s a dual business model. They sell fake five-star reviews and extort money using fake one-star reviews. Dean has spent eight years tracking down such scams, identifying thousands of bogus ratings targeting small businesses worldwide. She says Google isn’t doing enough. Clearly, Google’s algorithm should be able to identify uh that there’s something fishy going on, and I show over and over again that they don’t, but it’s a massive problem. Um, and I believe that’s uh distorting the marketplace globally. Google responded with a blog post from April saying advanced machine learning helped them block more than 240 million policy violating reviews last year, most of them before they were ever seen. But the people we spoke to said it can take months for reviews to be removed. And even once they are, more can crop up. One study shows that seeing just one review of three stars or less makes you half as likely to buy. So it’s not just new and small businesses that are easy prey. Even bigger businesses can live or die by their Google reviews.

Small businesses worldwide are being targeted by scammers using fake Google Maps reviews to extort money. The fraudsters post one-star reviews – ever-more convincing thanks to AI – then demand payment to take them down. FRANCE 24 investigated one scheme targeting businesses in France and Spain.
#scam #GoogleMaps #smallbusinesses

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