Hi Google Moderators and Local Guides!
We are Ploes Villas, a small vacation rental business on Western Peloponnese, Greece and so far we have only received 5-star reviews on Google from our guests. A few months days ago we received a 4-star review, without any accompanying text or justification of the score whatsoever, from a Google Local Guide who has NEVER been a guest in our vacation rental. And a few days ago, we received a 1-star review, from an equally random user, who has NEVER been a customer of our business either. We can confirm this in both cases, as we have a very small number of guests every year, and it is easy to keep track. You can also confirm the good standing and reputation of our business by all the other 5-star reviews we have received on Google My Business, and even by searching in websites like Booking.com for “Ploes Villas”, where we have a current rating of 9.8/10, as a confirmation.
Now, we take our guests’ reviews and feedback very seriously, so we were very disappointed to see this. This has lowered our review score for no apparent reason, as these persons have not stayed in our vacation rental and have left fake reviews without any justification. This is OBVIOUSLY defamatory, malevolent practice. We have kindly replied to their reviews with calmness and professionalism as you can see from our public reply, but they have not replied back to us.
Since these Local Guides have both left a review that violates the Local Guides Community Policy, we would like to request your help in addressing this issue by removing these reviews since they are fake content and reflect a malicious, defamatory practice. Please do note that especially the user who gave us a 1-star review is doing this serially, rating many businesses of the area with very low reviews and hateful, insulting comments, despite never having been their customer. You can confirm this fact by seeing the civilized, desperate replies of the respective business owners. Why are you still allowing such inconsiderate, malicious users to cause such damage, when it is prohibited by your guidelines??
("Contributions must be based on real experiences and information. Deliberately fake edits, copied or stolen photos, off-topic answers, defamatory language, personal attacks, and unnecessary or incorrect edits are all in violation of our policy. If you see this behavior, please report it. Users who abuse this trust will be removed from the Local Guides program.", taken from https://support.google.com/local-guides/answer/7358351)
PLEASE, monitor closely and remove such users from your platform. They only cause damaged to everyone, from the hard-earned reputation of working businesses, to the credibility and reliability of the content of your platform!!! PLEASE ACT accordingly and REMOVE these users and their fake reviews!
Please let us know how you are willing to proceed with this issue.
Looking forward for your reply.
Ploes Villas