A helpless London restaurant was bombarded by fake negative reviews from an ‘AI mafia’ gang to extort £10,000 – and experts are warning ‘pray you’re not next’.
Nikolas Lemmel says his online reputation firm, Maximatic Media, was called in by the eatery – which does not wish to be named – when it found its business targeted by online gangsters.
He claims a shell-shocked owner woke to find a barrage of one-star reviews had dragged her Google rating from 4.9 to 2.3 virtually overnight.
Nikolas says the scathing reviews accused the independent eatery as being racist, giving guests food poisoning and offering all-round poor service.
The owner then received an anonymous email from the ‘review-bombing mafia’ that claimed responsibility and demanded £10,000 in cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Nikolas explains the attackers were using AI-powered bot farms across the world to dupe Google into thinking they were legitimate customers writing reviews from London on a smartphone.
Maximatic Media said it worked with Google to remove the fake reviews and built a digital strategy that encouraged loyal customers to write positive ones.
It’s claimed they restored the restaurant’s Google profile to a 4.8-star rating within a month and the establishment hasn’t been contacted by the gang since.
A helpless London restaurant was bombarded by fake negative reviews from an ‘AI mafia’ gang to extort £10,000 (stock image)
Nikolas says the ‘AI mafia’ continued to flood the restaurant with negative reviews while they worked with Google to remove them, but over time they decreased.
The owner was encouraged to post a statement on social media outlining what had happened and to contact loyal customers with incentives to support her during the difficult time.
New positive reviews helped turn the tide against the attackers and restore the restaurant’s reputation for the ‘grateful’ owner.
Nikolas says he’s witnessing a ‘scary’ rise in automated attacks that put ‘livelihoods in limbo’.
However, he warned ‘there isn’t much you can do’ to stop this kind of attack.
Nikolas continues: ‘Usually, we see competitors attempting to decrease the standing of a business within the eyes of a local customer base, but this was an outside party.
‘They were trying to extort money to remove these reviews. They were like a review-bombing mafia.
‘They were using bot farms to mask the IP address of the accounts and emulate a mobile device that was in the area of the restaurant.
‘Usually, if someone was to leave a review from a different country then it would be easy to get it removed, but in this case it was a lot more difficult.
‘The owner was extremely thankful that we got all of those reviews down and she didn’t succumb to the extortion attempt.
‘There weren’t many precautions she could have taken to stop the review-bombing mafia from demolishing her rating.
Nikolas Lemmel (above) says his online reputation firm, Maximatic Media, was called in by the eatery
‘There isn’t much you can do other than pray you don’t become a victim of this sort of attempt. It’s scary.
‘Unless your business is within the IT field, this is above a lot of people’s pay grades and that’s why it’s hard to work out where it’s coming from or how to stop it.
‘It’s important people reach out to specialists in these sorts of situations because it’s a tailored approach depending on what’s happening.
‘If you see a business get hundreds of reviews within seconds then that’s a very easy tell-tale sign that it’s probably being targeted by an automated attack.’
Maximatic Media was founded in 2020 to help small businesses manage their online reputation through targeted PR strategies.
Nikolas says it has recently ramped up its crisis-management work to combat online villains abusing modern technology to target businesses.
He adds: ‘We’ve seen a rise of these sorts of situations where businesses are repeatedly facing these risks of having their livelihoods put into this limbo zone.
‘It is something many websites and platforms are working on making improvements in but sadly the attacks are also becoming increasingly complex and advanced too, so it’s a never-ending game of catch-up.’
A spokesperson for Google said: ‘Our policies clearly state reviews must be based on real experiences and information, and we use a combination of technology, expert analysts, and community reports to monitor for fraudulent content.
‘When we find scammers trying to mislead people, we take action ranging from content removal to account suspension and even litigation.’
Find out more at maximaticmedia.com.
