Small Businesses Face a New Threat: Pay Up or Be Flooded with Bad Reviews

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

mitchbob

8 points

9 comments

nytimes.comOtherstory

calmnegative

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Fake ReviewsExtortionSmall Businesses

Key topics

Fake Reviews

Extortion

Small Businesses

Small businesses are being threatened with fake bad reviews unless they pay, raising concerns about digital extortion and the long history of bullying tactics, with some debating whether this is a new phenomenon or just a modern iteration of old practices.

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Sep 11, 2025 at 1:54 PM EDT
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Discussion (9 comments)

Showing 9 comments

mitchbobAuthor

4 months ago

1 reply

https://archive.ph/2025.09.11-144447/https://www.nytimes.com...

SilverElfin

4 months ago

1 reply

Is that the right link? Doesn’t load for me.

aspenmayer

4 months ago

I can say that the link posted up thread works for me. If you need to access archive.today|.is|.ph and cannot, use their .onion domain over TOR (Browser); the link is on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

> archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion

So if you need, here’s a TOR version:

http://archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcb...

Or try:

https://archive.is/p8z10

You can also use this unlocked link to access the article on the NY Times’ site:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/technology/fake-reviews-s...

tartoran

4 months ago

1 reply

This is digital extortion. They should agree to pay but do an FBI sting operation instead.

SilverElfin

4 months ago

The FBI is not going to act across borders and hunt down some scammer in Pakistan or Bangladesh (the countries mentioned in the article). It is prohibitively expensive, their governments won’t cooperate, and there are also geopolitical issues at play (for example Trump shunning India recently and getting more friendly with Pakistan).

SilverElfin

4 months ago

2 replies

Is this really new? And is it even an Internet age thing? I saw that some small businesses in Texas are facing organized activism from conservative Islamic groups, who are threatening them with sustained protests if they don’t remove products that don’t fit their religious practice (like alcohol). The reality is that bullying and extortion and other forms of corrupt actions have always been around.

Maybe it’s easier now since someone on the other side of the planet can trivially post fake reviews and extort someone without any consequence since they’re in a different jurisdiction. But we should equally be suspicious of positive reviews. I have used contractors that had great online reviews only to be shocked at the poor quality of their work and the dishonest ways in which they handled my complaints.

My feeling - people need to shun their digital overlords like Google and rely on word of mouth again. At the same time, we need new laws to compel the largest tech platforms to do the right thing. They won’t if it is left to them.

slater

4 months ago

1 reply

> I saw that some small businesses in Texas are facing organized activism from conservative Islamic groups, who are threatening them with sustained protests if they don’t remove products that don’t fit their religious practice (like alcohol)

You have any sources for this?

SilverElfin

4 months ago

Here’s one, but there are others, and you can find videos on social media

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15078883/Sharia-pat...

The people doing this are posting videos of them harassing store owners on TikTok, to encourage others who follow them to do the same. In some cases they’re targeting Muslim-owned stores for not being Islamic enough, and in other cases they’re just targeting stores that are in “their neighborhoods”. Either way, they are trying to make it so that their business drops so that they’re forced to comply or so they give up and sell (to an Islamic buyer for cheap).

Note that this is part of a larger playbook of creating separate Islamic societies that has been see in other countries previously (like England, India, etc).

onecommentman

4 months ago

Not just Islam. There have been decades of clashes between the ultra Orthodox Jews who comprise 70% of Lakewood NJ and the remaining 30% of Lakewood and the general surrounding area. In the 1980s there were complaints of ultra orthodox going around and attempting to buy non orthodox homes warning that the neighborhood would be changing and they should leave now. Assume such tactics have been common among all religious cults of all flavors for centuries. Much more glaring and unsightly when it happens in the USA.

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