A Canadian company has won a court suit against a customer that maligned them on Yelp.

[jimintoronto]

The company has been in business for over 40 years in British Columbia, and they decided to bring the customer to civil court to have a Judge decide if the customer had been justified in making a number of Yelp comments , alleging a long string of "questionable business dealings " . The BC court Justice found that the customer's allegation were "untrue and malicious in nature". The court awarded the lumber company $90,000 in damages, and the customer will also have to pay the lumberyard's lawyer fees and additional costs. Here is a link to the story. LINK. Watch | Facebook The moral of this story is to be careful what you allege on line. In Canada in civil trials, if you sue somebody and YOU loose, you are likely to be ordered to pay the other parties legal costs. THat usually keeps the stupid stuff out of the courts, but not always, as this recent story proves. JimB.

 

[SeniorBen]

Good. I haven't read the article, but it's probably considered libel to post false and malicious comments about a business, and those who do that should be punished and pay for damages they caused.

Then there are the unethical businesses that pay people to post flattering and untrue comments about their business to get people to use their services. When you use their services, they're awful and there's no way the comments are true. It seems like the company could be sued for fraud in those cases. I've never heard of one being sued for fraud, though, so I don't know.

 

[Jules]

It took that poor owner 4 years of stress to get this cleared up.

My British expat friend ran a beautiful B&B. Then she got a single Yelp review that was really negative and many people cancelled. Even the previous and later positive reviews didn’t help for quite a while. She knew exactly who wrote the bad post and saw his reaction to her when he heard her English accent. She should have fought it; lawyers cost money.

When you use their services, they're awful and there's no way the comments are true. It seems like the company could be sued for fraud in those cases. I've never heard of one being sued for fraud, though, so I don't know.

It would be nice to see a few of those. Many are done under fake names and hard to trace back.