Hi everyone,
Greetings from the small country Belgium. I came across a business (sauna and wellness) that has a huge difference between the quality of the service they offer and quality according their reviews. After going through many of the reviews, I can only conclude that most of the reviews are written by the business owner himself. Many reviewing accounts have one, or just a few reviews, all from the same date. Most reviewers don’t have a profile picture. Bad reviews are followed immediately by a few good reviews to even out the score, and trying to burry the bad review under a few good ones. Moreover, I found that the owner has spawned five other google maps businesses representing the same business, but with a slightly different name, url and address, just to get more traffic to it’s place.
None of it would capture my attention, if it wasn’t for the bad service they actually deliver. It’s a subpar place. I’ve been there. The obvious fake reviews are misleading a lot of people, and are bad for business owners in the neighborhood not creating fake reviews.
Can someone talk to me about this? @AlexaAC
7 Likes
Hi @LinusDMZ ,
Thank you for reaching out to us!
In our Help Desk article, How and when to report reviews on Google Maps you will find useful information on reporting conflict of interest reviews, on Google Maps.
Additionally, please feel free to check out 14 helpful tips for using Connect.
Hey @AlexaAC ,
Thank you for the reference. I went through the information you sent, but I’m still not sure what to do in this particular situation.
The business owner has created multiple Google accounts (I estimate 50 to 100 accounts) to make 5 and 4 star reviews for its own business. I can’t go out and flag all these reviews (although I’ve flagged some obvious ones already), because the fake reviews will keep on popping up. I’d like to flag the business as a whole, but I’ve not yet found any way to do this 
The business owner is obviously violating the “conflicts of interests” paragraph, but I haven’t found a way to raise that issue.
Is there a way to raise more than one malicious review, and investigate all related reviews? (it’s really obvious, just one or a few reviews from the same day, no other activities, not even a real name displaying in the beginning, just “google user” because the account has just recently been created)
Kind regards.
Linus
2 Likes
Hi @LinusDMZ ,
I’ll send you a private message with instructions, thanks.
1 Like
@AlexaAC
Dear fellow Google maps enthousiasts,
I’m having to deal with a very sad and obvious case of fake positive reviews of a local business. I’ve searched for help before here, but to no avail. Although I’ve managed to report several obvious fake reviews, many are left, and even worse, more are coming almost daily. The pattern is very obvious. A review from a person with a very common name is created, with the account reviewing a few local businesses in the neighborhood (often the same!), all at the same day. If this would occur once, I might consider it as a strange coincidence. But this happens almost daily for the same business. Reporting the fake accounts separately has no effect. This is so sad! I’ve tried it myself: it’s easy to create a new Google account, and leave a fake review just a few seconds later.
Dear local guides: what can I do? Reporting the individual accounts doesn’t help. The business itself should be put on a black list, or at least be investigated thoroughly. Is this possible? Otherwise fake reviews keep popping up, which creates an unfair advantage on the Google maps platform.
Thank you for any advice or help.
2 Likes
Hi @LinusDMZ ,
Thanks for flagging!
I will merge your post to the previous thread and we’ll send you a private message, thanks.