A group of restaurants from San Francisco to New York have been targeted in an extortion campaign. The restaurants get a lot of one-star reviews on the internet, and then the owners get an email asking for a gift card in order to stop using the internet.
Nightbird is a fine dining restaurant owned and operated by Kim Alter. She shared the email she received from the extortionists on July 5. The email reads as follows.
Negative feedback about your establishment has been left by us One review a day is what will happen in the future. We would not want to hurt your business, but we have to do it. We live in India and have no other choice but to survive. We want you to give us a gift card for $75.
The email address that was offered to receive the code was the same one that was used to purchase the gift card. It ended with a second apology.
Alter asked for the help of the company in removing scam- related reviews. The restaurants she tagged were all experiencing the same review bombing. In the past week, high-profile restaurants across the country received the same threats and negative reviews.
The New York Times was told on Monday that the company was looking into the issue and removing reviews from people who weren't actually there. In February, the team explained how it used machine learning and live moderation to stop review bombing. These patterns can be anything from a group of people leaving reviews on the same cluster of Business Profiles to a business or place receiving a high number of reviews over a short period of time.
This particular extortion campaign seems to fall in that final category, with restaurants receiving a bunch of one-star reviews at once, but owners like Alter had to take the issue to social media to get assistance. It appears that the one-star reviews that were related to the scam have been removed from the restaurants' profiles.
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