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Consumer Alerts: On Your Side



Yelp is dedicated to consumer trust, whether displaying restaurant health scores or incorporating maternity care measures into Yelp business pages for hospitals that deliver babies.

That’s why we are releasing a new round of 177 Consumer Alerts to highlight situations where someone may be going to extreme lengths to mislead consumers (e.g., offering people cash to write positive reviews, paying people to remove their critical reviews, etc.).

These alerts are placed on impacted Yelp business pages, and contain links to helpful information about our investigation. The alerts will remain in place for 90 days to inform consumers about our findings.

You’d probably want to know that someone was offering $100 gift cards for positive reviews from residents at St Paul’s Senior Services. Or that Dental Kidz Club had a large number of positive reviews coming from the same IP address, suggesting an attempt to inflate this business’s rating. You’d also want a heads up that someone at Lash Allure was offering a 25% discount for 5-star reviews.

The Consumer Alerts program was founded in 2012 as an early component of Yelp’s larger Consumer Protection Initiative, which aims to empower and protect consumers. Though our recommendation software and team of skilled investigators work around the clock to limit a few bad actors’ efforts to skew results for consumers on Yelp, we also rely on tips from our community. If you see suspicious activity or tactics related to Yelp, please let us know.

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