Google my Business: more fake review issues
I have covered this before, see my GMB; Dealing With Fake Reviews Is Hit Or Miss blog from a year ago, to the day. But this week, there have been additional annoyances, like clear reviews which are not specific to our business, which I report as such, and within a day, I get an email saying it does not break their TOS.
I’m going to remove the individual’s names and business names mentioned as I’d rather not cause problems for my employer, the first 1-star review from a person with the initials AW says;
“The managers are very clever about finding ways to discriminate against poor people from out of state. They require a landlord reference but ignore the fact that some landlords will purposely write a bad reference to discriminate against a tenant who in reality is actually a very excellent tenant.”
The second 1-star review is from a user with the initials AB, who is clearly the same person, as I compared both profiles and the exact same reviews are posted to multiple properties across the two profiles.
“Professor [redacted] of [redacted] Community College announced in front of our entire literature class, “AB thinks I’m trying to white-wash.” Professor [redacted] is advocating for me and standing up for me because I am continually discriminated against for fair housing.”
Neither of these reviews is directed at any specific business in my opinion, but Google my Business disagrees, the first review from AW, I can kinda see, but the second from AB, seriously, it does not even make sense, let alone constitute a review of any business, let alone the business I represent.
We responded to each review, inviting the person to call us if they wished to have more information about our resident selection criteria. And, to our surprise, AB called, and our regional manager simply told her, after AB admitted that she had not applied for residency, that any future application from her, would be fairly considered, and it will be, as we strictly follow all fair housing regulations.
Within 30 minutes of this call, two more reviews from AB appeared, one 4-star and one 3-star, which upon further inspection, I realized that AB had created two more Google accounts with the same name.
These reviews read as follows;
“I will be an applicant in Summer 2022. I am a 4.0 GPA college student. I am a wonderful tenant. Please give special consideration to my application in spite of what my previous landlords might say about me. They are misled about my true personality. They do not know the real me. Please do not listen to any false reports from my previous landlords. Please give my application special consideration.”
And;
“I am a 4.0 GPA college student. Please give my application special consideration. The [redacted] Community College Chief of Police said to me over the phone, “You’re very polite, you’re very cordial. You’re a very intelligent young lady. You’re very smart.””
The fair housing laws that this person likes to invoke, do not allow us to give special consideration to her, fair housing laws state that we have to apply our criteria equally, which we do, 100% of the time.
Back to Google my Business, how can they consider these “reviews” to be legitimate? If there was an option to submit a custom removal request, I could explain fully, pointing out that these accounts are posting the same reviews across multiple accounts, maybe we could get these removed. How can we legitimately Google it when there are so many fake reviews out there, giving a false impression.