Kay Dean, a former government investigator living in San Jose, is out to prove that review sites like Yelp cannot and should not be trusted. She's got receipts.
It was 2017, and the San Jose resident had left a one-star review on the Yelp page of a psychiatry office in Los Altos. Then the letter arrived: It seemed the clinic had hired a local lawyer to demand that Dean remove her negative review or face a lawsuit. The envelope included a $50 check.
By the time her work was done, she’d found a higher calling — and SavantCare’s ex-CEO was fighting felony charges. Kay Dean goes through her fake review spreadsheets in her home office in San Jose, Calif., June 9, 2023.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.
“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.”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.
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