Yelp just can't stop living the thug life. 
 
 Five years ago, I asked whether the popular review site was a shakedown racket for merchants. I quoted a number of small-business owners who said Yelp had threatened to run negative reviews more prominently if they didn't pay for advertising. 
 
 Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp's chief executive, told me at the time that the San Francisco company doesn't strong-arm merchants. He blamed talk of shakedowns on disgruntled business owners spreading "false rumors." 
 
 I guess this is another one of those. 
 
 Rick Fonger, 62, decided a few years ago to end a career in journalism and move from Canada to Alhambra, where he opened a jewelry store. 
 
 "I've always been interested in gemstones and gemology," he said. "It was just something I wanted to do." 
 
 To give his shop, called 58 Facets Jewelry, a little social-media boost, Fonger spent about $300 a month advertising on Yelp. "It worked OK, not great," he said. 
 
 After six months, he decided to shift his limited marketing budget to direct mail. He canceled his Yelp ad in February. 
 
 The very next day, Fonger said, a Yelp employee called to say she wanted to help. She pointed out that competitors' ads were now appearing above the reviews for his store. 
 
 "She said that for $75 a month, she could make those ads go away," Fonger recalled. 
 
 He responded that this sounded a lot like extortion. 
 
 "She said she could understand why I'd think that," Fonger said. "But she said they do it to everyone." 
 
 As if that makes it OK. 
 
 "It certainly sounds like extortion," said Kevin Dean, president of WSI Net Advantage, a Fremont, Calif., Internet marketing firm. 
 
 "If Yelp just sold the ad space to someone else, fine," he said. "But to then call up and offer to make the ad go away for a price, that seems like an unscrupulous business practice." 
 
 I'll pause here to say that I think Yelp is a flawed but valuable consumer tool. I take the reviews on the site with a grain of salt, but it's a great place to get a quick pulse reading of people's opinions about restaurants, stores or other businesses. 
 
 That said, Yelp is a for-profit business itself, and it makes the bulk of its money from neighborhood merchants. About 83% of the company's nearly $71 million in revenue in the most recent quarter came from local ads. 
 
 This gives Yelp a powerful incentive to turn the screws on small businesses as much as it can. 
 
 Vince Sollitto, a Yelp spokesman, said that when the company's rep told Fonger that she could make competitors' ads go away for $75 a month, what she meant was that "you could buy out the ad space on your own page." 
 
 He said Yelp is doing the same thing that phone books do: selling ads that accompany related business listings. 
 
 The difference, of course, is that the Yellow Pages never told businesses they could pay extra to get rid of someone else's ad. 
 
 By offering this service, Yelp has introduced a more cutthroat approach to marketing, with itself as the broker for whose pitch is seen first by users of the site. 
 
 When I checked out the Yelp listing for Fonger's shop, an ad for a rival jewelry store appeared near the top of the page, undermining the influence of the nine five-star reviews that had been posted by customers. 
 
 Sollitto said he was surprised that Fonger likened the company's practices to extortion. He said Yelp is "all about connecting local businesses and consumers." 
 
 I asked how offering businesses a chance to pay a monthly fee for erasing a rival's ad was different from websites that post people's mug shots from arrests and then charge a fee to take them down. 
 
 Sollitto seemed offended that I'd even make such a comparison. 
 
 "Yelp has created a platform for sharing information," he said. "It's a discovery engine for small businesses." 
 
 And maybe he believes that. The reality, however, is that Yelp has created an online venue at which a merchant's competitors can post negative reviews and run their own ads. 
 
 Yelp then makes money by charging to downplay others' negative reviews and to keep rivals' ads away. 
 
 You know the old chestnut about succeeding in business by finding a need and filling it? Yelp succeeds by making a problem and then taking people's money to solve it. 
 
 This strikes me as an unfair business practice. But, so far, Yelp has weathered various lawsuits challenging its policies. "Their claims keep getting dismissed for lack of any fact-based evidence," Sollitto wrote last year on Yelp's blog. 
 
 I'm no lawyer, but I know a racket when I see one. Anybody who calls to say that you now have a problem but that they can make that problem go away for $75 a month isn't your friend. 
 
 Dean, the marketing consultant, said that Yelp is a fact of life for small businesses and that challenging the company's policies is going to be "a fight you're not going to win." 
 
 Instead, he advised companies to focus on Google and other online resources, and not lose sleep over any shenanigans Yelp might pull. 
 
 That's probably wise. But it doesn't excuse bad business behavior. 
 
 I asked Fonger how Yelp's tactics differed from, say, Tony Soprano's or Michael Corleone's. 
 
 "Well," he answered, "no one's come by to break my legs." 
 
 Then he thought about it a moment. "At least not yet." 
 
 David Lazarus' column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com. ||||| Investigators working for Mr. Schneiderman began by posing as the owner of a Brooklyn yogurt shop that was the victim of unfair reviews. Could the reputation management firm gin up some good reviews to drown out the naysayers? 
 
 All too often the answer was yes. The investigation revealed a web of deceit in which reviewers in Bangladesh , the Philippines and Eastern Europe produced, for as little as a dollar a rave, buckets of praise for places they had never seen in countries where they had never been. 
 
 In some cases, the reputation shops bribed their clients’ customers to write more fake reviews, giving them $50 gift certificates for their trouble. They also went on review sites that criticized their own fake-review operations and wrote fake reviews denying they wrote fake reviews. 
 
 The investigation was aimed at companies based in New York, but it will have a wider reach. “This shows that fake reviews are a legitimate target of law enforcement,” said Aaron Schur, senior litigation counsel for Yelp, which has taken an aggressive approach in screening out reviews it believes to be false. Yelp recently sued a California law firm for writing fake reviews of itself. 
 
 Within recent memory, reviewing was something professionals did. The Internet changed that, letting anyone with a well-reasoned opinion or a half-baked attitude have his say. Web sites loved this content, because it was free. So consumer reviews became ever more ubiquitous — and influential. 
 
 Reviews persuade people to try a new resort or shun an old restaurant. They sell books and the devices the books are read on. They influence the choice of garden tools, plumbers, high fashion and, increasingly, doctors. If you provide a service or sell a product and you are not reviewed, you might as well not exist. 
 
 In a 2011 Harvard Business School study, a researcher found that restaurants that increased their ranking on Yelp by one star raised their revenues by 5 to 9 percent. A 2012 Gartner study estimated that one in seven recommendations or ratings on social media sites like Facebook would soon be fake. And there have been instances where all the reviews of a product have been secretly bought and paid for by the seller of the product. 
 
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 Some retailers and other sites that feature many reviews have largely ignored the problem, perhaps not wanting to scare away real customers. Others have been like Yelp and been more forceful in addressing the problem. 
 
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 But the New York investigation shows that the fakers are constantly increasing in sophistication. “Do not make them sound like an advertisement,” one firm investigated by the attorney general cautioned its writers. Another boasted of using multiple computers to foil suspicions that arose when more than one review came from the same machine. A third talked of outwitting Facebook . 
 
 “Sadly, it will take continued policing, both by law enforcement and the review sites themselves, to make sure some businesses stop lying to customers they claim to serve,” Mr. Schneiderman said. 
 
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 Fake reviews undermine the credibility of the Internet. Olivia Roat, a marketing consultant for Main Street Host, a Buffalo digital marketing agency, discussed her growing realization that fake reviews are omnipresent on the company’s blog last year. “Say it ain’t so!” she wrote. Who, she wondered, could be trusted? 
 
 Apparently not Main Street Host, which was one of the 19 companies that signed an agreement to desist. The agreement says Main Street Host “engaged in astroturfing on behalf of over 30 clients,” using a term referring to writing fake reviews. Executives there could not be reached for comment on Sunday. 
 
 For the service companies, buying reviews seems a shortcut to the better reputation they are unlikely to achieve on their own. 
 
 US Coachways, another company in the investigation, is a charter bus service based in Staten Island . If a prospective customer were to look on Yelp, she might get the sense that this is not an outfit she would want to hire. 
 
 “This company basically ruined what was otherwise a great trip,” wrote a typical reviewer in 2012. Currently, the company has 14 reviews averaging one star. It is not possible to get much lower than this. 
 
 Edward Telmany, US Coachways’s chief executive, was upset about the low ratings, according to the formal Assurance of Discontinuance he signed with the attorney general’s office. 
 
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 “We get bashed online,” Mr. Telmany wrote, accurately, to his employees on Nov. 20, 2011. “We are loosing [sic] money from this.” 
 
 His response was not to fix the problems that customers were citing, like buses never showing up, but to begin a full-fledged effort to get fake reviews. Mr. Telmany hired freelance writers, mandated that his employees write favorable reviews and even pitched in himself. He posted a five-star review on Yelp that began, “US Coachways does a great job!” 
 
 Neither Mr. Telmany nor a spokesman for US Coachways could be reached for comment on Sunday. The company agreed to pay $75,000 in fines and stop writing fake reviews. 
 
 Faking reviews often begins with faked reviews of the company faking the reviews. In October 2010, a review appeared on Yahoo that said the writer was “thrilled” by the services provided by Main Street Host. He added that he just didn’t understand “why this company gets all the negative reviews.” He also said, “for the record, I am not a Mainstreethost.com employee, don’t know anyone who is, and have no knowledge of anyone else’s experience but my own.” 
 
 The review was, of course, by a Main Street Host employee. The company agreed to a $43,000 fine.
– Rick Fonger, who owns a California jewelry store, used to advertise on Yelp. The day after he stopped, last month, a Yelp employee called to tell him that his competitors' ads were now showing up above the reviews on his store's Yelp page. "She said that for $75 a month, she could make those ads go away," Fonger tells David Lazarus at the Los Angeles Times. When Fonger told her that sounded like extortion, "She said she could understand why I'd think that. But she said they do it to everyone." A Yelp rep later explained to Lazarus that she was simply offering Fonger the opportunity to "buy out the ad space on [his] own page." The practice does sound like extortion to Lazarus, and to the expert he consulted. The Yelp rep "said Yelp is doing the same thing that phone books do: selling ads that accompany related business listings," Lazarus writes. "The difference, of course, is that the Yellow Pages never told businesses they could pay extra to get rid of someone else's ad." And therein lies the problem. Lazarus points out that other small-business owners have accused Yelp of threatening to make negative reviews more prominent if the owners didn't buy ads on the site. "Yelp succeeds by making a problem and then taking people's money to solve it," Lazarus writes. "I'm no lawyer, but I know a racket when I see one. Anybody who calls to say that you now have a problem but that they can make that problem go away for $75 a month isn't your friend." Click for his full column.