This sucks for customers but as a business owner it's pretty rational behavior. If everyone is going to judge your business based on some 3rd-party rating and s

This sucks for customers but as a business owner it's pretty rational behavior. If everyone is going to judge your business based on some 3rd-party rating and someone offers to boost that rating for you for a few hundred dollars ... you have to be very confident and moral to say no. As a consumer I am conscious of how often I choose a particular restaurant because it has many high-star Google ratings. In a big city the difference between 4.0 stars (100 ratings) and 4.3 stars (700 ratings) is probably tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue.