Google places negative review nightmare.

bwman said:

Read 7878's thread.

It basically goes into details on what meethevirus said under ''whitehat''


Read this thread, you'll surely know what to do

Click to expand...

Thanks for the link mate. Very interesting read indeed.

blow them away with positive reviews, fight fire with fire

I will tell you one thing that might do it, and I know it is very drastic, but it did work for me and my hardwood flooring site, but it was just dumb luck that I pulled it off.

This might work for you if you tweak it.

This is what happened, you may be able to BH this into a solution.

I got a number from Vumber that was for a company that had some bad reviews before I got it. I contacted the reviews sites and explained that this number had been re-assigned, and they dropped the listings. I did this with Google as well, and it worked. I was able to go in ang claim the Google places spot for my own.
I know that your situation is different, but bear with me.

Change the phone number and address of the business that has the problem, then start two unrelated businesses and use the phone number for one and the address for the other.

Using Proxys, contact Google as the new business owner and ask how to get your phone/address released. Ask for their help, and wait for them to fix it. If they get 2 seperate requests for a release from what appears to be legitimate businesses that need these numbers cleared, they will release them. When they do, go in and reclaim the number and address, and forward them to the original business.

I know you wanted real world examples and this is not a tested solution for your problem but I thought I would throw it out there.

gizmodo posted a piece about a program that can detect fake reviews
read up on it, i'm certain google is using something similar, this post is oooold
http://gizmodo.com/5825059/software-can-detect-fake-reviews-with-90-accuracy