San Francisco restaurant plagued by online rating scammers
SAN FRANCISCO -- Owners of a San Francisco restaurant are being targeted with negative one-star reviews on Google by scammers who are hoping to cash in.
The reviews are hurting their businesses as many restaurants continue to struggle to recover from the pandemic.
The San Francisco restaurant's owners said the whole ordeal has been a nightmare.
Lucho's is a family-run business in San Francisco's Lakeside neighborhood. Husband and wife Luciano Romero and Kelly Barbieri own Lucho's, a small restaurant serving up American-California cuisine with flavors of the Yucatán where Luciano is from. When the owners started getting one-star reviews on Google every day, it was devastating.
"We thought, oh my goodness what did we do?" said Barbieri. "Who did we upset?"
"It's horrible!" said Romero. "It's like, this is going to take my business down."
During the pandemic, thieves broke into their business three times. Now, they're getting hit again, this time online.
"If you go from a 4.8 to a 4.0 rating, people don't read why," said Barbieri. "They just assume something's wrong with the restaurant, and they may not come visit you. It can really just destroy your restaurant."
In all, they received 11 one-star Google review ratings. Then came the emails from the scammers themselves, saying they were from India and threatened to keep sending one-star reviews unless they were sent a $75 Google Play gift card.
"It's awful!" said Lucho's customer Rose Gilardi. "Small businesses, you have to support them."
Kelly and Luciano reached out to Google for help, but at first Google said they reviewed the negative ratings and did not find any violations of its policies. But then a few days later, the one-star reviews were taken down.
"Hopefully, Google keeps this under control," said Kelly Barbieri. "We still wake up and wonder if there's going to be another review. Like, we don't know if this is the end of it."
Through this whole ordeal, the owners of Lucho's just want Google to have a better system in place to check these scammers, so this doesn't happen again.
Google Reviews allows consumers to leave star ratings with no review text.
A Yelp Communications Director called these Google Review scammers "deceptive" and said the scammers were able to get away with it, because unlike Yelp, Google Reviews does not require ratings to be accompanied by actual text reviews.
KPIX reached out to Google but did not hear back from them.
