'It is basically extortion': US restaurants slammed with fake negative reviews online

Lutes, who has been in business for seven years, knew that scammers had found him. Then he recalled receiving earlier emails from mysterious companies offering to review negative ratings, for a fee. It all added up. — Business cartoon vector created by jcomp - www.freepik.com

After the holiday weekend, Greg Lutes, owner of 3rd Cousin in Bernal Heights, got an email from Google that his fine dining restaurant had some new reviews. He clicked the link and saw a flood of uniformly bad one-star ratings left with no further comments.

Knowing this is the kind of thing that can sink a place over time, Lutes fired up an app to try to dispute the reviews, only to have his input denied. He was just starting to get suspicious that he was being targeted when an email arrived to his business account.