Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be blunt, they're total bullshit. Which is why you never see any evidence , outside of vague hearsay from someone's uncle. Yelp has a small army of people cold-calling every business in the country to sell ads. Simultaneously and independently, they have a system that filters out bad reviews, all day, every day. Just by chance, someone is going to get called soon after reviews have been filtered. This leads, inevi…
It could be a small part of those people who are doing this in order to have a bigger bonus. Bad incentive structures that cause bad behaviours is not an unknown phenomenon.
Also, again...nobody offers evidence of these conversations. It's all hearsay. Lots of accusations, but not so much as a link to a profile page to back them up.