Auckland’s best restaurants have been hit with fake Google reviews due to fraud fears

The Restaurant Association says people who choose to eat out are encouraged to “read beyond the reviews” after Google was flooded with fake reviews of top restaurants.

A number of restaurants, including The French Cafe, Sidart, The Sugar Club and Cassia at SkyCity, have been “spammed” with reviews – most of which are believed to be false – in the past week.

Outside, it has been reported that online scammers often start posting five-star reviews from fake accounts.

They then follow up by threatening to leave unfavorable “one-star” reviews unless they receive payment or gift certificates.

Marisa Bidois, CEO of the Restaurant Association, said scammers specifically used the labels to target businesses that were often powerless to do anything.

“Bad ratings can have a very significant impact on hotel companies, lowering their overall rating,” Beddos said.

“If left unaddressed, it can affect where a customer chooses to dine, which is the last thing these businesses need while they are still recovering from the pandemic and weather events this year.

“It is imperative that review sites continually check the legitimacy of reviews to stop this,” Beddos said.

“We also recommend that diners do more research when choosing places to eat and make sure they read beyond the reviews.”

Chand Charwat, co-founder of several restaurants including Sidart and Cassia, said she was shocked when she woke up yesterday to 94 reviews for The French Cafe.

She said: “Most of them are good reviews, in fact 84 gave us five star ratings, but that is not true because they are fake.”

“If we see what’s going on outside, these people often come back and extort money and say if they can get 100 good reviews, what’s to stop them getting 500 bad reviews?”

Shrawat said the reviews were “patently wrong,” with some saying they liked the breakfast and coffee at the French café, despite the restaurant not being open for breakfast.

I wrote a complaint to Google, but they only removed two of the posts.

Shrawat said tourists and visitors to Auckland often rely on reviews to choose which restaurants to eat at, and fake reviews can negatively affect business.

A SkyCity spokeswoman said it was aware that a number of restaurants in New Zealand were being targeted with fake reviews.

“It’s similar to what we’ve seen happen in other countries,” she said.

We have contacted Google to try to resolve the issue. We have not received a response.

“In the meantime, we encourage customers to consider the legitimate reviews and reputation our restaurants already have.”

Simplistic practices by organized groups have been reported in India, but variations of scammers have been observed in other countries.