Early this week, the owners of Sugar High Bake Shop in San Angelo noticed that their online reviews began filling up with negative comments.
It was more than just one supposedly unsatisfied customer: dozens of negative reviews started showing up under the bakery’s posts on Facebook, and more importantly, in their Google reviews:
“We’ve worked incredibly hard for two years for that five-star average,” says owner Sabrina Acosta, “I’m not concerned about my customers now, I’m concerned about the new people, because now our page is popping up in so many feeds.”
The bakery, located at 101 N. Main St., has built up a fanbase based on quality and customer service, and the owner says that’s exactly what these negative reviews were targeting.
According to Acosta, many of the comments insulted employees by name, and criticized everything from the food itself to the size of the parking lot.
Acosta explained that after the first wave, she received a video of a foreign man saying to her “you see how I’m going to f*** your business up?”, along with him scrolling through his phone and showing all of the different fake accounts he created to post fake reviews.
Acosta says that this is a new practice in online extortion called “review bombing,” where a disgruntled person, for instance, hires someone to create fake accounts and post bad reviews. In many cases, the victim can avoid the fake reviews by paying a fee: in this case $100.
Acosta says they’re not going to pay the scammers, but they do want to make sure everyone is aware of what’s happening. She says they’re pretty sure they know who did it, and that it’s now in the hands of the authorities.
Right now, reviews created by bot accounts are being reported manually, but there’s only so much the owners can do until the problem is resolved with the scammer.
If you go down through the comments of Sugar High’s reviews, most locals whose names are recognizable around town seem to have high praise for the bakery.
