There is a business locally that appears to be threatening bad publicity with lawsuits, and through one method or another, they are getting many accounts to post positive reviews that seem mostly illegitimate.
I’ve personally seen and heard enough about the business itself to know that these overwhelmingly positive reviews are not all legitimate, and a lot of the extremely negative ones are truthful. In fact, someone I know is in the process of bringing them to justice in civil and criminal court (via the district attorney & FTC). There is a large element of Fraud & false advertising here though, and the google maps reviews play into it.
I’ve began trying to manually go through their hundreds of likely illegitimate reviews & reporting them. Many are employees, contractors hired by them, accounts with similarly written raves/statements and usually only one review tied to their account, and a couple that seem genuinely written. The result is that they have hundreds of positive reviews and the genuine negative ones are buried.
Is it possible to report this business specifically (rather than hundreds of reviews) and get a more thorough review done on their business’ reviews specifically? Also, because this might tie into a legal case of fraud later on, would it be possible to get an official report of the findings of such an investigation? Or could I get contact information to give to proper investigative authorities (i.e. the FTC) so they may receive the report? Something like information on how many of the reviews were found by google to be fake, and any info that might pertain to a fraud investigation on the topic of false reviews.
In the end, these positive reviews really mislead people into thinking they’re a great company, and influences them into signing contracts with the company, which regularly seems to defraud people and provide service nothing like advertised or stated in these positive reviews. I’d certainly like to see the false reviews taken down even if nothing else comes of it. The business they are involved in, affects people greatly in very important ways. It’s very misleading, and I’d like to keep google reviews from guiding people wrong.
Off topic: is it possible to download a video off of the google maps reviews/photos section?
Moderator Tag: @MashaPS