A cleaning company recently targeted by "professional reviewer" extortionists has condemned a fake flier sent out in its name, writes Jamie McCarron.

Happy Clean, a domestic cleaning service in Blanchardstown, Dublin, was bombarded with one-star reviews on Google three weeks ago.

It was then contacted by an extortionist who wanted €1,000 to replace the negative reviews with positive ones.

The extortionist, using a Pakistani phone number, offered to add hundreds of five-star reviews for €1,000.

Livia Andoreanu, co-founder and managing director of Happy Clean, told the Irish Daily Mail yesterday the firm is planning to report an even more sinister and organised scam to gardaí.

Andoreanu said: "We were contacted on Friday by a man in Dublin saying that we power-washed his driveway for several hundred euro but didn’t complete the work.

"He wasn’t someone we had ever worked for. It turns out he had gotten a flier identical to ours in his letterbox that has our website on it but with two different phone numbers and it’s nothing to do with us."

She added: "There is someone using our reputation, our adverts, our YouTube videos of before and after work and happy customers to take business from us.

"They even invoiced someone under our name."

Andoreanu rang the phone number, in a video seen by the Mail, and the man answering the phone indicated he was working for Happy Clean and encouraged her to look at "his" website.

She said: "This is very serious, we are getting our proof together to bring to the police [gardaí].

"I think it might be linked to the review scam we were recently targeted with."

Andoreanu’s firm was contacted on WhatsApp by "professional reviewers" three weeks ago, shortly after Happy Clean received several bad reviews on Google.

She warned that "not all is as it seems" on Google and that buying hundreds of fake five-star reviews has unfortunately become "common practice" among many small businesses.

Andoreanu added: "They said to me, 'We can make your business disappear, we can damage your website so that it’s not being shown on Google anymore because of all the one-star reviews'. I replied, 'Good luck with that', then I contacted Google to say they are blackmailing us and the reviews are fake."

Happy Clean received reviews complaining of "very bad service", and saying its work wasn’t "worth the money" from Google users with unusual names such as ‘Harm Peters’ and ‘Mark Smeets’.

Andoreanu said: "We were contacted by a different number, obviously working with the first extortionist, who claimed they would remove the bad reviews for me and replace them with good ones if I paid them."

She refused to give in, but said: "It’s hard doing things the fair way when you know other companies aren’t.

"Unfortunately, I know that it’s common practice to pay for these reviews to boost your search result so when people Google 'carpet cleaning Dublin', they appear first and get most of the business. We have been in business for more than ten years and have 700 reviews. There are competitors that have only been in business two years that have thousands of reviews.

"It simply is not possible to get that many in that timeframe without paying for the fake ones.

"I know that many people check a company’s worst reviews to see if there is anything worth being aware of, so we may have lost business in those weeks. I just want to appeal to everyone that you can’t rely on Google anymore and not all is as it seems."

She added: "This is not just about us, it’s a growing tactic that can damage the reputation of any Irish small or medium business relying on online reviews. I urge other businesses not to fall into this trap of paying off the extortionists."

Photo: Livia Andoreanu.