Kim Alter owns the restaurant Nightbird in San Francisco. One morning in July, she checked her email and found a polite extortion demand. The message said: “We’ve already put one-star reviews up and we will continue to do so until you pay us. We’re really sorry. We know this is illegal. Thank you.”
The scammers said they wanted $75 in gift cards.
Alter posted about the threat online. Other restaurants that had received similar threats responded quickly, she said. She found that restaurants from New York, Chicago and places in Texas were also targeted.
Emily Williams Knight, president and CEO of the Texas Restaurant Association, said blackmailers hit dozens of restaurants in Houston alone.
“Houston seemed to, from our perspective, get hit first and the hardest,” she said.
She said her organization worked with the victims to kill the sham reviews, but it took days to get them taken down and, in the meantime, more popped up.
Review extortion isn’t new to the hospitality industry. Industry blogs have discussed the phenomenon for years. But this particular scam comes at a touchy time for the restaurant industry with inflation squeezing profits and high staff turnover.
“If you’re a manager, you’re continually hiring people to replace the people who are quitting, because they could find higher paying jobs elsewhere,” said Bob McNab, an economist at Old Dominion University.
Short staffing could mean longer…