The 2013 sting on reputation firms
- New York's Attorney General ran an undercover investigation called Operation Clean Turf.
- Posing as the owner of a yogurt shop in Brooklyn, the Attorney General's office called leading SEO companies in New York for help with negative reviews. Some offered to write fake reviews of the shop and post them on Yelp, Google Local and Citysearch, as part of their reputation management services.
- 19 businesses were fined between $2,500 and $100,000 each. Some reviews were written for as little as $1, by writers as far away as Eastern Europe and Bangladesh.
“They will write dozens and dozens of phony reviews and actually provide strategy for how to force bad reviews down further on the website”
What the FTC told review management firms
- In 2022 the FTC sent letters to ten companies offering review management services. The message: avoiding the collection or publication of negative reviews violates the FTC Act.
“Examples may include asking for reviews only from those likely to leave positive ones, preventing or discouraging submission of negative reviews, subjecting negative reviews to greater scrutiny, refusing to publish negative reviews, or otherwise not treating positive and negative reviews equally.”
Six questions to ask before you sign
- How do you get a bad review taken down? The honest answer is a report to the site, for a review that breaks its rules, and the site decides. Here's how Google decides, and how Amazon does.
- Who writes the new reviews? The only safe answer is your own customers, every one of them asked in the same neutral way.
- Do you ask every customer, or only the happy ones? The FTC letters name the second.
- Do you hold any negative review back, or check it harder than a good one? The FTC letters name both.
- Will you put in the contract that you never write, buy or hold back a review?
- What do you read each week, and what do you do about it? Sola Abulu, a crisis and reputation consultant:
“crisis management as a whole ignoring sentiment is a big mistake”
Crisis Management and Crisis Communications, Knowing The Difference, October 2025
- Hold that answer against our list of what to watch every week.
- A firm can't make a news story or a creator's video disappear either. Here's what can and can't come down.
If you pay creators
- The firm needs every creator post that's live, and who can pause it. That list opens our social media crisis plan.
- Our check on the creators you pay is free: their old posts, every brand that has paid them, and whether their fans are real.