Shame On You, You Mean, Nasty Fake Yelp Reviewers!

August 11, 2013

 

I woke up to stumble upon some very interesting finds online. Once I grabbed a cup of, ahem, afternoon coffee, I fired up the old laptop and Googled ‘Peaceful Warrior Martial Arts.’ I was actually just making sure that our Google map was correct, but the first item that popped up was our Yelp review page. I figured I’d check it out. We had two new great reviews from happy parents that I’m super pleased about. We also had an unusual amount of reviews that had been filtered. I was curious about that and entered the secret code to access that page. 

What I found was appalling. Three horrible, and clearly phony, filtered reviews that had all been written one-week apart between July 22 and August 6. The reviews talked about our “Black Belt Club,” which we don’t offer, that we “don’t compete in tournaments,” which we do, plus a bunch more hogwash that didn’t make sense. Obviously realizing that these reviews were a sham, Richard and I created some amusing public responses. I then delved further to investigate. Come to find out, the same aliases decided to go on a hate campaign and posted a slew of similar fake reviews for five other schools all within a certain geographic area, one review going as far as accusing a school owner of murder. Upon digging even deeper, these same people had posted beaming reviews for one karate school in particular that shall remain nameless, for now.

It turns out this school recently had a bad run-in with some parents who weren’t pleased with their children’s summer camp experience and posted their honest and negative feedback on the school’s Yelp page. Apparently, the school then contacted and blatantly lied to these parents to try to get them to remove their posts. One parent posted a follow up to her review that reads, “I just received a message from the owners that they are selling the studio” and they asked her to pull down her review so it wouldn’t affect the “new owners.” Another follow up review reads, “I find it funny that customers are being told that the bad reviews are coming from other karate places.” 

Unfortunately for these deceptive critics, they weren’t so great at covering their tracks and we were able to trace each reviewer back to this particular school. Instead of handling the issues like true professionals, the school’s owners lied to their customers and ambushed other business owners, including Richard and I and our entire staff, due to their own fear and lack of confidence. For a school who claims to teach courtesy, respect and discipline (characteristics listed on their website), they seem to lack these very standards for themselves.  

Oh, I also went for a swim today.

UPDATE - Monday, August 12 at 10:15pm - 
After posting this a mere 3-hours ago, one of the reviewers removed ALL of his/her negative reviews of the other karate schools, including ours, and one negative review for a day care facility (which also beams about why he/she left them to take his/her fake kids to this particular karate school). Little does this fake reviewer know, I have all the screen shots. Duh!