SCOTTSDALE, AZ (AZFamily) — There’s an ongoing scam targeting small businesses here in Phoenix and around the nation.
The scammers are raiding the internet with negative reviews and it’s causing small businesses a lot of problems.
Kim Coates and Isaac Navias say their company is being unfairly targeted with negative, fake reviews.
“This one says, ‘Product broke in just one day, asked for help. They walked away, worst experience I’ve ever had, this company is truly bad,’” Navias said.
The couple runs a digital marketing company in Scottsdale called LocalFi. It specializes in helping business promote their products and services online, so they know how important it is to have positive reviews on Google.
So when they woke up one day to a series of fake reviews about their business, they knew they had a problem on their hands.
“They were in broken English,” Navias said. “They were talking about products. We don’t even sell products. And it was just like, oh my God, what’s happening right now? And then they kept coming in as I was searching.”
They got 17 one-star reviews in a matter of just a few hours, all from different profiles, but written with similar language.
As a result, their company’s Google rating dropped from 4.9 to 4.3 by lunchtime.
“Since we help clients with online reputation for years now, I understood, like, ‘Oh, we’re being attacked,’” Navias said.
The last few reviews included a phone number that appears to be in Pakistan, and a message.
“One of the final reviews left for us, it literally said ‘Hey, brother, you need to contact me. And if you contact me on the number in my profile picture, we’ll take down all of these reviews,’” Navias said.
All those negative, fake reviews were posted by overseas scammers demanding hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to take down the negative reviews.
Navias and Coates didn’t contact the scammer but they documented everything and sent the evidence to Google. Friends also reported the reviews as fakes and Google took them down.
“It was really amazing,” Navias said. “The community came together to support us. But no, I would think the average business owner, if Google doesn’t see that there’s an issue with these reviews, it can be a really hard battle.”
Navias wants Google to ban accounts that leave these kinds of fake reviews but so far, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
And as big companies like Google depend more and more on AI to monitor these things, he believes fakes will be harder to remove.
“From all my research, this is becoming a larger and larger problem,” Navias said. “And it’s something that, unfortunately, Google really doesn’t have a good solution for.”
Navias says if this happens to your business, document everything and submit it to Google. Contact your local police. Extortion is a felony. Report the reviews to Google and have your friends do it too.
And submit a legal claim to Google, letting them know someone is using their platform to commit a crime.
We did reach out to Google for this story, but they did not get back to us.
See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.
Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.
Copyright 2025 KTVK/KPHO. All rights reserved.