There's currently a growing outcry against business review site Yelp. Citing hardships due to Coronavirus, Yelp has been busy creating GoFundMe pages in the names of possibly thousands of small local businesses, soliciting donations from the public without the names businesses' knowledge or involvement.
Reached via a link on Yelp's review page for each business, the GoFundMe page claims that concerned customers can donate money, allegedly to help the business cover costs or employee pay during the economic downturn; Yelp claims that it will match the dollar amount of public donations, "in the form of waived advertising fees, free products, and services". However not only has neither Yelp nor GoFundMe been asking permission from the businesses in whose name the pages were opened; they haven't informed the businesses that those pages even exist or that any donations were being received, the onus apparently being on the businesses themselves to somehow magically discover their GoFundMe page's existence and go through the process of "claiming" the donations. The entire scheme is frankly unconscionable; imagine a bank, or a restaurant, or a gas station having a big glass jar labeled "donations for disabled veterans", and then simply keeping and sitting on that money, "holding onto it" for the day when a disabled veteran happens to walk into the gas station and happens to ask to borrow money.
Some businesses who have discovered that GFM pages were opened in their name have described a complicated and unnecessarily long process to get the page removed.
Reached via a link on Yelp's review page for each business, the GoFundMe page claims that concerned customers can donate money, allegedly to help the business cover costs or employee pay during the economic downturn; Yelp claims that it will match the dollar amount of public donations, "in the form of waived advertising fees, free products, and services". However not only has neither Yelp nor GoFundMe been asking permission from the businesses in whose name the pages were opened; they haven't informed the businesses that those pages even exist or that any donations were being received, the onus apparently being on the businesses themselves to somehow magically discover their GoFundMe page's existence and go through the process of "claiming" the donations. The entire scheme is frankly unconscionable; imagine a bank, or a restaurant, or a gas station having a big glass jar labeled "donations for disabled veterans", and then simply keeping and sitting on that money, "holding onto it" for the day when a disabled veteran happens to walk into the gas station and happens to ask to borrow money.
Some businesses who have discovered that GFM pages were opened in their name have described a complicated and unnecessarily long process to get the page removed.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2ylTkap
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