""" The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."

"""

just Google it [1]

(by the way everything you see there is an analogy, people don't mean that it's literally associated with the actual mafia, it's still a tech company run by white-collar people just like me and you, people just object to the business model and want someone to get them to stop. there are no guns or the like involved, it's not what people mean. just tactics.)

just read these links: [2] from here on Hacker News going way, way back. choice quote "Yelp has been routinely hiding bad reviews and fixing good reviews to the top. It is a total scam and a total extortion scheme for local businesses." from 1385 days ago (3.7 yrs so 2012)

- [Edit: among large tech companies/startups that get discussed heavily] it's literally the only tech company anyone utters within the same breath as extortion or mafia.

let's compare: a lot of people complain about PayPal, or things like eBay's fees or whatever. But nobody complains about any company literally running an extortion racket using mafia tactics. Yelp is absolutely unique in receiving this charge. [among the type of companies I mention]

of course whenever it happens its old CTO or whoever will come here and be like, 'noooo I would have known man no way. founder here. not even a little bit. nu-uh.' you can go find that quote if you want, it's why I started the second search above, but I realized I don't actually care. :)

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=yelp+mafia

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=yelp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&...