Every time I have seen it all, I see a new type of review attack. This review attack happened over the weekend for Right Away Garage Door. Somebody hit their Google Business Profile (GBP) with ten fake 5-star reviews. When I first looked at the reviews, it appeared that somebody had used ChatGPT (AI) to auto-write review replies and mistakenly posted them as 5-star reviews. It turns out that I was wrong.
The business owner posted in a private Facebook group asking for help with removing the fake reviews. I was unaware of this post as I was offline yesterday. When I had a chance to look at the GBP and reviews, I thought somebody had made an enormous error and believed this was one of the fake Right Away Garage Door spam profiles. Nope, this is just a new attempt to hurt a business with Google reviews.
Google ended up disabling nine out of ten of the accounts. The names are listed as “A Google User.” I know that the accounts were disabled because when you click on the name, nothing is displayed.
This image is what Google shows when you click on an active profile.
This review attack would be a great case to monitor to see how long the reviews will remain live. If this were a fake business profile, I would watch the reviews to see how long it takes Google to remove them. Since this is a legitimate business and the reviews show how little the company cares about its customers and negative reviews, I will ask Google to expedite the removal of these fakes. Negative reviews have become the new marketing tactic over the past few years as it’s addition by subtraction.
