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Are Some Yelpers Holding Restaurants Hostage?

Yes.

We've heard the stories going back 3 years.

Recently two women in Boston seated themselves without reservations at a restaurant and threatened to leave a bad review if they were removed. And last month in San Francisco, surveillance footage at a Chinese restaurant proved a Yelper made up a story about poor treatment in a 1-star review.

"People often feel a sense of entitlement at restaurants," says Kaylie Milliken, the director of "Billion Dollar Bully", an in-progress documentary about Yelp's questionable practices and the ways some users exploit the site. "Yelp allows a public platform, and they hope they can manipulate the system to get what they want."

Justin Abad, proprietor of Pop's Sea Bar and Cashion's Eat Place

Using Yelp as an extortion tool is something Justin Abad, proprietor of Pop's Sea Bar and Cashion's Eat Place, has witnessed. While waiting on a table at Cashion's in 2009, he encountered a diner who requested that her mixed cookie dessert come with only chocolate chip cookies. Abad apologized and said he couldn't honor the request due to limited supplies.

"She threatened to leave a bad Yelp review," Abad remembers. I said, "You think threatening me with a bad review will gain you more chocolate chip cookies?" I was a little patronizing, but this was a woman in her mid-40s in business attire at a table with grown-ups.

If a business owner feels a commenter violated Yelp's terms of service and content guidelines, he or she can seek its removal.

Just because a customer is threatening a bad review, they may not be seeing what they are doing as extortion.

Remember that extortion is illegal. But just because a customer is threatening a bad review, they may not be seeing what they are doing as extortion. They may just see it as a way to publicly complain that the business was not honoring a reasonable request. To you, the business owner, it may be an entirely unreasonable request and the customer is threatening in order to get special treatment. You have to be wise enough to know the difference.

Read more at The Washington Post.

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