At least five Montreal restaurants, including Salle Climatisée, Bistro La Franquette, Mastard, Restaurant Limbo and Le Violon, have been hit with a surge of negative Google reviews with the same reviewer names. It’s a shakedown: Reviewers demand money to remove the comments.
“Obviously we didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole, so we just went the proper way,” says one restaurant-owner, but reporting through Google can be an opaque and limited process and AI tools have supercharged fraudsters’ efforts.
The Gazette’s Harry North digs into the extortion scam.
