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The owner of a pub in the UK says he had to have a negative review taken down from TripAdvisor after he was blackmailed by a customer who threatened to post a negative review after he refused to refund a meal.
Piers Baker of the The Sun Inn pub in Dedham says he was approached by a customer three days after they had eaten at his pub. The customer told him they had fallen sick after eating lamb at the pub and that they expected a full refund or they would file a negative review on TripAdvisor.
Baker says he told the customer he would only refund if they could prove the food poisoning with a doctors letter or an investigation from the Food Standards Agency. He also added that he had served the lamb to over 40 different people that night, including staff, with no reports.
The customer eventually followed through and posted the negative review as threatened.
Speaking with The Telegraph, Baker said: “We get it frequently, people who sit in and say 'if you don't take this off my bill, we will put it on TripAdvisor'.
"We will take it off if there's something wrong with it. The threat is irrelevant. If they behave like that we don't want them back anyway."
It’s not the first time that customers have been called out for threatening restaurant owners and chefs with bad reviews in return for favours.
In 2015 a restaurant manager in Massachusetts called out two rude women who had seated themselves without reservation and sat with Yelp open on their phones to try and intimidate the staff.
There has also been a number of cases of restaurant owners using CCTV to shame customers who left bad reviews. One owner decided to show the clean plates of a bad reviewer and another went as far as to post a video showing that the reviewer left the restaurant before actually eating any food.
