Nobody deserves this to happen to him.
Sam, Burton, and Michael Fun Drew are
both in the pest control industry,
but they don't work together.
The Beaverton men are actually competitors.
If we've Troost, I had refused to
switch over any of his customers.
Yep, this small business owners have teamed
up to try and stop another kind of pest,
one that is attacking them online
with fake one star Google reviews.
We want to conduct our business
focus on running our businesses,
living our lives and not using
every other waking moment.
Trying to get this resolved
KGW investigates.
Knows of at least twenty pest control
businesses in Oregon getting targeted
with fake reviews on their Google
business profiles over the last year.
Seven of them agreed to do
an on camera zoom interview.
Raise your hands if you have. Fake
reviews on your Google profile right now.
The fake reviews are driving down
their Google rating, costing them
thousands in lost revenue and skewing
the whole system. For consumers.
It dropped me down from five stars to 3.6.
So nobody is looking at a
3.6 star company period and.
Who knows, you know what it did?
To my revenue, my searches are down
hits on my website or down my phone.
Calls are down drastically from a year ago.
The business owners say these reviews are
not from unhappy customers with a gripe.
These are fake computer generated
one star reviews designed to
hurt a company's rating. What
has this been like? Torture Burton
runs Prime Pest solutions with his wife.
There were certain days where
I'd just call like every single
government entity that I could
think of that would potentially
be in charge of handling this.
Burton said his fake reviews started in
March of this year, so these are fake
reviews. Yes, how do you know?
So in the pest control industry
we have this ability to be able
to pull customers names because
we are required by the Department
of AG to keep service records for
everybody of these one star reviews,
not one of them.
As a customer, Burton had
an idea who might be doing this.
He had an employee quit via
text message last year filed
for unemployment and then start
his own pest control company.
Burton said the one star reviews
really ramped up after Burton
denied the former employees.
Employment claim
can we average 121 to two
fake reviews today? Burton
contacted the former employee,
who denied it.
He then contacted Google,
the Beaverton Police Department and the
Department of Justice and got nowhere.
Burton didn't know it at the time,
but fun brews business,
banish pest control was also getting
hit with fake reviews helpless.
I just felt absolutely helpless
when they started rolling in,
especially because I didn't know who
it was or where they were coming from.
At a certain point, both
men hired Jason brown@reviewfraud.org,
a company that tries to help
business owners get fake.
Who's off their profile?
Google is so big simply flagging a fake
review isn't enough to get it removed,
even if it's clearly computer generated and
not a real customer like the fake reviews
for prime and banish fun, Drew said.
The bogus reviews are easy to spot.
The grammar is. Not consistent
or correct punctuation as well,
it's just. Garbled sentences, almost
Brown started doing research
and found at least twenty pest
control businesses in Portland.
Getting hit with fake one star reviews
this case in Portland is just the is
is most interesting one I've seen,
because even when when we identified
the culprit, it's still not stopping
Brown said all of his research and
evidence shows Burton's former employee,
who now owns his own pest control company,
is the person behind the targeted attack.
Raise your hand if you believe
the same person is behind the
majority of those fake reviews.
The business is getting hit with the
fake reviews range in size from one man
operations to large pest control companies,
and so it reduces us coming up
in the search results 'cause
it's dropping our star rating.
It's impossible to stop it. All
of them say Google could do more.
I can almost handle.
The the kid who's doing this.
Uhm, what I can't handle is Google's
indifference to enabling it.
And without a doubt they are enabling it.
They they they could do
something about it and I get it.
They are so huge they just
don't have time to tinker
with 18 companies in Portland.
But they've got policies in
place that that are just a joke,
Brown said. Google did remove some of
the fake reviews a few months ago and
also removed 75 five star reviews of the
competitor that they believe is behind this.
But new reviews replaced the old ones.
Eight of the business owners also filed
complaints with the Federal Trade Commission,
but no action has been taken yet.
Burton filed a lawsuit
against his former employee,
who again denied doing this,
but the reviews haven't stopped.
They're just all at their wits end,
because it's just it's never ending.
And Google is just not doing enough to,
you know, come in and stop it,
Brown said. These fake reviews mess
things up for consumers who use Google
when choosing a business or service.
It's one of those sad things.
And now we're at a point
in time where we can't.
We came and trust five star reviews and
now we can't trust one star reviews.
So what reviews can we now trust?
Beaverton business owners feel
like this is a never ending
problem that no one wants to fix.
So we're just looking for a resolution.
And honestly, we just we want it to stop.
We just want it to stop.
OK, let's talk to Kristen
about this for just a minute.
Were you able to
get ahold of Google? How does
someone get ahold of Google?
We were we reached out to Google.
I heard back from a spokesperson.
They said, you know what?
We have teams of automated systems and
teams have actual people working on this.
A spokesperson said,
quote our policies clearly.
State reviews must be based on real
experiences and information and we closely
monitor 24/7 for fraudulent content.
They went on to say, you know,
staying a step ahead of
scammers is a constant battle.
And our teams will continue to
investigate the situation and
remove policy violating content,
and I think you know that last sentence,
there really says it all.
It's a constant battle because Dan last
year Google removed 55 million reviews.
Fake reviews.
Those
are the ones they could remove.
You know many are out there so you know.
Again, there are probably businesses isn't
just pest control businesses locally.
There are a bunch of business owners
who are saying I've gone through this.
What are they supposed to do then?
I mean, that's a big question.
Now you flag it. You contact Google.
It doesn't always work.
Google did remove some of the fake reviews
of the companies you know in our story.
After I contacted Google,
but there are still fake reviews on
many of their Google business profiles,
so I think the thing to take away the thing
I learned when doing this story is you know,
next time you're looking to hire a
business you know you may not want to
rely solely on that five star rating.
Take a minute, go in, read the reviews
because you can tell the fake reviews.
It sounds like it looks like
a bot wrote it, you know.
You can see that fake one star
review and maybe read the reviews.
Don't just go on the on the rating.
Good
advice. Still feel for
those businesses they know.
Alright Kristen, thank you you bet.