Natalia Piper was busy running her general contracting business in Los Angeles when a random message popped up on WhatsApp in June.
“Someone has ordered me to post a negative review on your business,” read the message, from a phone number based in Pakistan. “Got an order to post 20 reviews.”
Startled, Ms. Piper responded to ask who had placed the order. And just replying was enough to ensnare her in a widespread scam targeting small businesses across the world.
Fraudsters are extorting businesses for hundreds of dollars each by threatening to post fake negative reviews on Google Maps — or posting fake negative reviews and then demanding a payment to remove them, according to reports from multiple businesses and data from an industry watchdog.
The scammers target small businesses that are highly reliant on online reviews to drive their business — including movers, roofing companies and appliance repair services. Negative reviews can drive down a business’s star ratings and damage their online reputations, potentially costing them thousands in lost revenue. They’re also difficult to remove from Google once they’re posted.
Ms. Piper had already paid $150 to someone else, who was using a number based in Bangladesh, to remove negative reviews that they had posted. Then the person in Pakistan reached out, and she paid them $100 to remove the reviews. Weeks after that, 10 more fake reviews popped up on her profile. This time she did not pay, and Google eventually removed the reviews after she had reported them.
Ms. Piper said that before the fake reviews were removed, her Google rating for her business, Build Solutions, had fallen to 3.6 stars from 5.0.
“It took me eight years to get my reputation in the market, and one guy can damage it in one day,” she said in an interview.
Though many consumers see online reviews as a valuable source of information to guide their purchases, online ratings are often highly manipulated. Companies like Google and Amazon routinely remove hundreds of millions of fake reviews yearly, yet countless more slip through the cracks.
Fraudsters have taken advantage of the strained system for years. But artificial intelligence tools have also helped supercharge their efforts, giving scammers the ability to pump out realistic-sounding fake reviews at an enormous scale.
“There is this whole underworld that’s underpinning what you see online that people just don’t know about,” said Kay Dean, a former federal criminal investigator who has tracked the scams for months with Fake Review Watch, an industry watchdog she started to monitor the fake review business. She identified more than 150 businesses around the world who were targeted with fake negative reviews.
Watchdogs and businesses have largely blamed Google and other review websites for not doing enough, arguing that the companies’ moderation decisions are opaque and that few tools exist for businesses to control their online reputations.
“These businesses are being extorted and Google isn’t doing enough about it,” Ms. Dean said.
The Federal Trade Commission put in place a new rule in 2024 meant to crack down on fake reviews, but it was mostly aimed at businesses that purchase fake positive reviews for themselves. The regulations added no new requirements for review platforms like Google, Yelp or Amazon, which, under a federal law known as Section 230, have broad protections for content that appears on their websites.
In an emailed statement, a spokesman for the F.T.C. said that “reviews must reflect the honest opinions of the reviewer” and that the people behind fake reviews could face “civil penalties of more than $53,000 per occurrence.” The F.T.C. sometimes works with other governments to stop overseas scammers or refers cases to the Department of Justice.
Google allows businesses to report fake reviews, but the company offers no way for business owners to speak with someone directly at the company.
Ms. Piper said that she had tried contacting Google through multiple avenues, even the company’s advertising department, through which she spends thousands to promote her business on the search engine. She said that she received no help.
“Until those reviews are gone, you get no calls and no customers want to hire you,” she said.
In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman for Google said that the company removes the “vast majority of fraudulent content before it’s ever seen” and has put restrictions on more than 900,000 accounts that repeatedly violated its policies.
“We do not tolerate scams on Google Maps and take a range of actions against them, including content removal, account suspension and litigation,” the spokeswoman said. She added that Google planned to release a tool that would allow businesses to report when they were being targeted by scammers, but declined to provide additional details.
Ms. Piper said that removing her cellphone number from her business pages stopped new scammers from messaging her on WhatsApp, which ended the scam. She has advised other businesses in her network to do the same.
One account that had posted fake negative reviews to Ms. Piper’s contracting business had done the same to more than 30 other business, according to data Ms. Dean collected. That included a drywall company in Covington, Wa., and a locksmith in Switzerland.
One of the fake accounts targeting Ms. Piper also targeted Nick Betourney, who runs a moving company out of Lawrenceville, Ga.
Mr. Betourney had spent years marketing his business and trying to get customers to leave genuine reviews for Budget Moving Services, a company he started six years ago. Eventually he earned a 5-star rating on Google Maps.
Then, on Aug. 11, he got a message on WhatsApp telling him that someone had ordered 20 fake 1-star reviews for his page.
“They are going after smaller businesses, basically, that are service-based businesses that don’t get as many reviews as a restaurant or a Walmart,” Mr. Betourney said in an interview. He reported the reviews and Google soon removed them. But the next day, five more fake 1-star reviews showed up on his page.
“It wasn’t just that ‘the service was bad,’” he said. “It was crazy elaborate stuff like they had smashed a box, that the movers ‘intentionally took a box and smashed it on the ground in front of me.’”
The person who contacted Mr. Betourney used the name Rashid Ghallu on his WhatsApp profile and used a phone number based in Pakistan. When contacted by The New York Times, the person said that his business involves writing fake reviews on Google Maps, charging $100 for 20 reviews. The person denied extorting businesses using negative reviews, saying instead that they receive contracts from unspecified clients to post negative reviews and contact businesses before doing so in case they would rather pay.
Patterns like those observed by Ms. Dean — where phony accounts bombard multiple businesses in unrelated places with negative reviews within days or weeks — should be easy for Google to spot and remove, she said. Yet the reviews are often left online until businesses individually report them.
“It’s just an ocean of disinformation,” she said, “and people don’t really have the ability or the time to sort what’s real or fake.”
Stuart A. Thompson writes about how false and misleading information spreads online and how it affects people around the world. He focuses on misinformation, disinformation and other misleading content.
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