Bay Area woman on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

Dean, who once worked as a criminal investigator in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General, smelled something fishy. She decided to look into the clinic, part of a small California chain called SavantCare.

By the time her work was done, she’d found a higher calling — and SavantCare’s ex-CEO was fighting felony charges.

Since then, Dean, 60, has mounted a yearslong crusade against Yelp and the broader online review ecosystem from a home office in San Jose. Yelp, founded in San Francisco in 2004, is deeply entrenched in American consumer habits, and has burrowed itself into the larger consciousness through partnerships with the likes of Apple Maps. The company’s crowdsourced reviews undergird the internet’s web of recommendations and can send businesses droves of customers — or act as an insurmountable black mark.

Dean follows fake reviews from their origins in social media groups to when they hit the review sites, methodically documenting hours of research in spreadsheets and little-watched YouTube videos. Targets accuse her of an unreasonable fixation. Yelp claims it aggressively and effectively weeds out fakes. But Dean disagrees, and she’s out to convince America that Yelp, Google and other purveyors of reviews cannot be trusted.

“This is an issue that affects millions of consumers, and thousands of honest businesses,” she said in her YouTube page’s introductory post on April 30, 2020, facing the camera dead-on. “I’m creating these videos to expose this massive fraud against the American public and shine a light on Big Tech’s culpability.”

“I don’t do it lightly. If I put a video up, it’s serious,” she told SFGATE in May. “I’m putting myself out there.”

‘Must be a shady company’

Dean is particularly motivated by the types of small businesses that she’s found gaming Yelp’s recommendation algorithm. She has spotted seemingly paid-for reviews on the pages of lawyers, home contractors, and doctors’ offices — high-ticket companies for which she says she’d “rather have no information than fake information.” 

It all started with her own visit to SavantCare.

Perturbed by the letter and check she received, Dean started poking around the clinic’s other reviews. A Yelp post from December 2017 was the first crucial clue. “Melissa R.” wrote, “I was offered money to leave a positive review for Savant Care Clinic. Must be a shady company.” The user attached Craigslist screenshots of the apparent offer, which Dean took her own screenshot of just before Yelp removed the post for violating its terms of service.

Next, she traced a positive Yelp review for SavantCare to Facebook, where she found that the reviewer was a member of several review groups — a black market for buying, selling and exchanging fraudulent Yelp and Google reviews. A few clicks and an alias account later, Dean was offered pay or a positive review of a company in exchange for writing a friendly 150-word review for SavantCare.

Dean began documenting her findings, starting with serial offenders from the Facebook groups. In a list of 17 people who reviewed SavantCare on Yelp, she found what she called “a suspicious pattern”: 10 of them had reviewed the same dentist’s office in Los Angeles, nine had raved about the same California wedding DJ company and five claimed to have visited the same Mountain View tattoo parlor. Five of the accounts, she noticed, had even reviewed the same moving company in Florida.

She sent the evidence to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, hoping the officials would investigate the profiles and businesses she’d found and prompt action from Yelp itself. 

Meanwhile, Dean took SavantCare to small claims court over the letter and calls she later received, and won a $275 judgment in March 2018 for “negligent infliction of emotional distress.” It was “a matter of principle,” she told SFGATE. She also reached out to Sasha Ganji, the lawyer whose signature was appended to the letter she’d received from the law firm appearing to represent SavantCare. Ganji never touched the document, he told Dean; apparently someone had used his name and signature without his knowledge. 

In March 2020, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office filed three felony and two misdemeanor charges against SavantCare’s former CEO, Vikas Kedia, as well as the law firm in connection with the letter Dean received. The charges included “using personal identifying information without authorization” and “unauthorized practice of law.” When reached for comment, Kedia declined to speak on the record about the case to SFGATE. His next hearing is on June 21.

The citizen investigator

Dean started her Fake Review Watch YouTube channel in April 2020 hoping to create a compelling research repository for regulators, investigators and journalists — as well as enlighten anyone who might happen across her videos.

“Folks, the online review business is the Wild West, and there’s no sheriff,” she said in her first YouTube video. 

She started by joining a few Facebook groups, watching as business owners bought $100 reviews from brokers and Yelp Elites, the verified accounts with “thoughtful reviews” and “awesome photos” who get by the platform’s review recommendation algorithm. 

Late last year, she discovered a network of Yelp Elite accounts with profiles populated with reviews that seemed to be lifted word-for-word from Tripadvisor posts, some several years old. In Yelp reviews for a Bay Area contractor, these same Elite accounts posted professional-grade photos — purportedly of their home renovations, but according to Dean, actually grabbed from Zillow and Realtor.com house listings from as far away as Florida. 

One business owner she spoke to was dealing with a Yelp reviewer who offered to change fake one-star reviews he’d posted to five-star reviews if the business owner paid up. “Extortion, right there on Yelp messenger,” Dean said in her video on the topic, after showing screenshots of the exchange. Businesses can’t opt out of being listed on Yelp, so it’s not as if a business owner can simply yank their profile if they believe they’re being targeted with false negative reviews. 

Dean found plenty of culprits in California. She called out seemingly fake reviews on the Yelp pages of a Kardashian-approved cosmetic surgeon, a San Francisco veterinarian and a Newport Beach obstetrician-gynecologist. She found a network of Southern California college students reviewing the same Bay Area home contractor, hundreds of miles away. One Facebook user openly posted “YELP Reviews Available in reasonable price,” with a screenshot of his faux-five-star ratings of a Pleasanton remodeling company.

She rarely gets more than 500 views per clip, but Dean’s “case study” videos are compelling: She mounts an argument, case by case, that the review ecosystem is filled with enough deceit that it negates any benefits of using Yelp. And it goes beyond Yelp: She’s made videos about posts she believes to be fake on Google Reviews, Trustpilot, Healthgrade and the Better Business Bureau.

Kay Dean versus the algorithm

Yelp has taken notice. After a set of videos calling out sketchy reviews for a Bay Area contractor and its digital ad agency, Dean said she saw dozens of the profiles she’d mentioned in her videos get taken down, alongside more than 3,000 reviews. Yelp also reportedly marked the businesses’ pages with 90-day “Suspicious Review Activity” notices, which say that “someone may be trying to artificially inflate the rating for this business.” 

Dean said the notices validate her work, but also perfectly exemplify what she calls Yelp’s “whack-a-mole” approach. Yelp’s official policies prohibit businesses from asking for reviews and users from writing reviews that don’t reflect their own firsthand experiences. But she showed SFGATE several sketchy posts that she hasn’t mentioned in her videos — and which are still up and active.

 “I find it annoying, like, ‘You need me?’” she said. “They see everything [that] I do. They have to. They’re a billion-dollar tech company that’s got teams of engineers and a trust and safety team.”

A Yelp spokesperson said the company is an industry leader in cracking down on fake reviews.  Yelp “makes significant investments in technology and human moderation to protect the integrity and quality of content on our platform,” the spokesperson said, and “proactively investigate[s] attempts to deceive our users.” 

In February, Yelp said its automated recommendation software checked the 21 million reviews submitted last year for “quality, reliability and user activity” and had filed 75% into the “recommended” category, which are the reviews that figure most prominently on businesses’ pages and affect their star ratings. Of the remaining 25%, just 4% were removed by Yelp’s own moderators, 2% were removed by the reviewers themselves, and 19% were categorized as “not recommended reviews” — which don’t affect companies’ star ratings but are still accessible on businesses’ Yelp pages.

In Dean’s mind, it’s not enough. She feels Yelp should better use account data to proactively identify problematic users and ban them altogether, and speculates that Yelp might be avoiding a crackdown on fake reviews because the positive boosts to businesses’ ratings might increase Yelp’s value to those businesses.

(Lance Yamamoto/SFGATE)
(Lance Yamamoto/SFGATE)

Before Fake Review Watch and all her research, Dean used review sites often, she said. But now she tells everyone she knows to stick with good old word-of-mouth — especially with recent additional hits to the online system, like the surge of reviews spurred by COVID-19 policies and new reports of AI chatbot-written Amazon reviews.

She doesn’t intending to call individual business out as uniquely fraudulent, she said, but wants people to see fake review rings as widespread, fixable problems — issues that tech giants need to handle better. 

“What started as a real boon for consumers, the whole online review platform, all of it was a real neat innovation, but I think the tech companies have really created a Frankenstein’s monster,” she said. “It’s just out of control.”

Hear of anything happening at Yelp? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.