Counter troll with positive reviews. Get your friends to do it too as well as satisfied customers.

Seriously I agree. Have friends do it if you're not comfortable. Shit post you business name here and FML people can do it haha.

Yep, do this and add pictures which serve as proof. Good luck OP

#4, with the way people are on this site, OP will end up with more bad reviews. For example, all the "your/you're" corrections...

Agreed! Fight fire with fire, OP!
And what kind of website doesn't check and see that all the bad reviews come from the same IP address and are posted using recent accounts?!

One of the restaurants I work for had the same thing happen. The owners gave us a free drink or dessert every time my coworkers and I posted a positive review. Hopefully OP can work it out and turn their business around :)

Thats....actually kinda illigal......at least in the US
OP should check New Zealands laws before doing that.

47—I can see how it might be unethical, but how would it be illegal? You can't be arrested or fined for bribing people to post positive online reviews (false or not) or for bribing people to post negative reviews. It's not false representation,either, if it's a review site like Yelp. What aspect of it do you think is illegal?

Actually, you can. Look at the recent "Amazon reviews" case.

@49 Bribery is illegal in the U.S. although I doubt anyone would actually do anything about a restaurant manager rewarding customers for leaving positive reviews.

Agree with #22. Unless it's a super smart person who is changing IP's, computers, locations, getting friends to post reviews for them, or using a proxy server to get around that, they're probably using the same IP and the site should be able to trace what IP the user is posting from. Contact customer service, politely inform them that you are being harassed, and ask kindly if they could please go out of their way to check the IP of the reviewers for confirmation. In their eyes, at least, one bad review may be valid, but a bunch of bad reviews from the same person is harassment and should not be tolerated.

isn't it illegal to spread lies about a company? I'd focus more on the fraudulent claims than bribery.

#60, I agree 100%! And my guess is that it's just a customer that might have had a bad experience (maybe it was the restaurant fault, maybe it was his, we'll never know) and now has decided that this is their mission: fuck with the restaurant. So I doubt they would have that much work, right?!
OP, fuck with this guy!

It's probably classed as slander or libel, making it illegal.

And yes, OP can sue this guy. He's making him/her lose customers and is harassing him/her. You can (and should) post a bad review if you had a bad experiense, but this is way beyond that. This is illegal and is indeed a reason to sue.
It can also be a competitor that's intimidated by OP's success. Which would be an even bigger problem...

I was about to say the same thing as #61 and those after- this is absolutely slander, as the troll is causing legitimately big issues in sales at OP's restaurant under false accusations, and OP can certainly charge/sue them for it.

great idea #1, in fact, OP, share your business on here and you can have the entire FML army assist!

I agree with 1. I had a little trouble with the same thing a couple months ago.

Why is it no one ever excepts a bad review? It probably did happen. There is very little service in the service industry these days because it is always some one else's fault when things go wrong.

Excessive bad reviews are not common, especially if you work there and know what's going on. Just because one person had one bad experience doesn't mean they should ruin the restaurant for it. Distasteful and immature.

#68- In my experience (as both a waitress and a customer), a customer having a bad time is typically a self-fulfilling prophecy by way of the customer just being a general asshole from the start.

@68 OPs not talking about one bad review. They are talking about the fact that this one person has posted a bunch of false bad reviews that have destroyed their business.

That sucks, OP. Hopefully you can gather some evidence to have the reviews taken down and your business can get saved and begin to prosper.

Can this be classified as deformation of character or something along those lines? If it can I would contact an attorney and see if he can be held accountable in some way.

yes also I'm sure he can sue for lost earnings

Defamation?

@19 No deformation... he deformed his business' image and OP's mind.

Generally it's one word against another with no evidence, so they side with whoever spoke first. Unfortunately that's against you.

If you can get them, IP addresses for the accounts making the posts are considered proof.

Pretty sure you'd have to prove malicious intent (the poster intended to harm business sales), that every post/review is untrue, not to mention provide motive. It might be worth it to hire a private investigator or lawyer to look into it, but I'm sure it's not a simple matter. Oh, and 33, the word is most definitely "defamation" (as in their character/business was defamed, made unpopular).

#39- Yeah... That's not how it works. If this anonymous reviewer is purposely leaving multiple awful reviews about OP's business that are not only false incidents but greatly hurting business, it would be on THEM to prove they aren't breaking the law. OP's evidence would simply be the fact that all the reviews, even from multiple accounts, come from the same IP. The reviewer would either have to provide evidence of these events actually happening to show they ARENT just slandering the business- which is illegal, or come up with some really believable story that explains the harassment and need for so many accounts. And that's not even factoring in whether or not this person is someone who could very possibly have motive from knowing OP personally, which makes them look even worse.

Post a review saying that someone is messing with the system and that your restaurant is actually great, if you'd had successful business before I'm sure that people may overlook it.

some people just want to see the world burn....

said people are douches who post bad reviews to feel better about themselves

don't worry OP. things should turn back up for you :)

If he's taking so much time and effort by making new accounts and stuff, he/she may be someone who you wronged in the past, or it's just some wanker with no social life.

If people actually beileve these trolling reviews enough to kill your business, maybe you actually did something...

Or people are morons, for not seeing a troll.

How can you see it's the same person but your potential customers can't?

A ton of negative reviews all of them lying about OP's establishment? Doesn't take a genius to figure that one out. And people will generally believe people's badmouthing without bothering to get the other side of the story. So yeah, there's that.

Not to mention that Op said none of the things happened. So all bad reviews from that person have a made up part in them.

It's probably someone that you know on a personal level that is very jealous of your success

That's what I was thinking! Thought-Jinx!