My client recently had an incident, where a direct business competitor, attacked my client personally and professionally on Facebook. I know this is a Google Reviews article, not about Facebook, but this is where the story started. The exchange was bizarre and after several statements made by the competitor were malicious lies, my client looked the competitor up on Facebook. He was able to determine that the person launching these lies against my client on Facebook actually owned a competing, local moving company. My client confronted him with this knowledge on Facebook, but the competitor denied being the owner of a competing moving company.
The Facebook attack stopped, but shortly after, the competitor’s girlfriend left a very negative 1-star review for my client. How do we know it is his girlfriend? We researched her on Facebook and her profile says she is in a relationship with the competitor, with tons of pictures of them together. After a quick search, we compiled tons of evidence against these 2 nefarious reviewers.
- We have social media posts showing their relationship.
- We pulled the state business filings from the competitor, which showed that the person who slandered (actually libel) my client on Facebook, truly was the owner of a competing business.
- We have pictures of the competitor with his business truck.
- We have screenshots of the competitor’s Facebook Business Page.
- Circumstantial sort of, but still very revealing, the girlfriend has only ever left two reviews. One review was great, and guess who it was for? That’s right, my client’s competitor. The second review was for my client and it was a real stinker.
If you have evidence that a review is fraudulent, you may have luck getting it removed. Here is where I started. This form walks you through the options you have to contact Google My Business! I have had good luck using the automated chat, but the customer service will tend to be short and to the point, and usually results in a we will look into, or {“type”:”block”,”srcClientIds”:[“32389626-c18d-467e-a9d8-17f3915bec3e”],”srcRootClientId”:”3ae79568-9d18-4db2-a035-52a73565e3df”}we will investigate, please wait 48 hours, such as was in this case.
To chat with Google My Business about fraudulent reviews, you can go to this link and follow the process below!
https://support.google.com/business/gethelp
