Toronto restaurants being bombed with one-star reviews by delivery driver
When one Toronto restaurant owner noticed he'd recently been blasted with a bunch of one-star reviews all at one time, it raised his suspicions.
TuckShop owner Robb Eng was able to trace the bad reviews of his Leslieville location back to one disgruntled delivery driver. That's when he knew he had a bit of a problem on his hands.
"Over the last few days, my Leslieville TuckShop restaurant got hit with four one-star reviews on Google. I had no idea who the customer was and after digging into this, it appears to be from an unhappy delivery driver," Eng tells blogTO.
"I didn't have any issues with any driver over the weekend, so I don't know why they'd do this to my business. I only found out it was a driver because I saw that the same four people had also given Papyrus, another restaurant, four one-star reviews on Google just before mine."
When Eng consulted with the owner of Papyrus, he said he believed the reviews came from a DoorDash driver he'd had to throw out for making a scene.
Complaining to DoorDash and trying to get the reviews taken down on Google hasn't been successful.
"While we don't use Door Dash, we use Uber and the same person also gave us a one-star review. I'm assuming he works for both companies as a driver," says Eng.
"These organized online driver attacks seem to be happening to more restaurants after I posted asking for help on the Restaurant Navigator Facebook page and heard similar stories from others."
Though the incident caused the TuckShop location's rating to drop from 4.9 to 4.6 stars overnight, Eng's requests for Google to remove the reviews have been denied.
"I'm hoping some more coverage can expose this and warn other restaurants of these organized online attacks, and help stop other owners from dealing with this," says Eng.
"Or if more speak up we can try and get Google to remove these reviews."
Hector Vasquez
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