local guides black mailing me and my business. Recently, my business had a five star rating. An online reputation company was hired imo, by a competitor, to ruin our goole rating, and after I refused to hire this company, nymarktech.com, which has: a phony durango co address, a forwarded phone, an email that goes nowhere, shortly after I refused to pay them $100/month to put up good reviews, which is against google policy, which I refused to do, imo they began to use local guides, who I never worked for ever, imo, to post one star reviews for my business, which is destroying our hard fought five star reputation. Google has utterly refused to do anything about these fake reviews, put up by these local guides: this is libel and black mail and character assassination, put up by this company imo, which is actually based in Irvine ca.
However this kind of activity, especially if you have evidence of this, should be addressed to the Local Police Department, not in the Local Guides Community. The police can address an illegal activity in the appropriate way, while Google do not have any Legal power against them.
In addition you can flag, with your GMB account, every review, and you can report the issue on your community: the Google Business Profile Help Community
Representing your business in the Local Guides Community is in fact against our policies:
Google certainly has power over the local guides committing this libel. They could remove them ie. They could check their fake posts and ip address to see it’s all coming from one ip, ie.
Thank you for sharing your concern with us. Since you are a business owner, the best way you can report a Local Guide, who you think is violating the program policies, is by following these steps here. You can also reach out to the Google Business Profile Help for some additional inquiries.
Keep in mind that participating in the Local Guides program as brand, organization, or business, and not an individual is a violation of our program rules, as it’s important Local Guides contribute content as unbiased individuals.
I moved your post to How-tos, since it is not related to the board you published it. Here, you can swap advice with other Local Guides and share how to create helpful contributions on Google Maps and Connect. When you have a question, you can start a new post or search if there is something similar to what you are asking already on Connect. Also, I recommend you read this article: How to choose a topic for your Connect post. I have redacted the names of the Local Guides you shared on your post, as we respect everyone’s privacy. Please take a moment to review our Community Policy.
Don’t forget that you can tag Connect members in your posts by writing @ before their name. This way, they receive a notification and know that you are trying to communicate with them directly.