Anyone else had or heard of a similar problem with Yelp?

So my brother in law just opened a Endodontist practice a little over a year ago and they have been trying to keep customers coming in. A little background, this guy is top notch. Harvard Dental, Washington Endo, scored 2nd in the nation on his board exams, has been an endodontist for 6 or 7 years with 3 in the military and several working for other offices while he decided where to set up his practice. He is a class act and makes multiple calls to all of his patients after their procedures to be sure they are feeling alright and not have any complications.

Now the issue. I don't really use Yelp but I did look up their office on Yelp to confirm that it is consistent with what they said. Bro in law told me Yelp is super popular with the populace in their area. Because of that they have always asked their patients to make Yelp posts about their experience. After a year they had about 20 posts on Yelp and all of them were 5* then along comes some "certified Yelp reviewer" who gave them 1 star. Apparently certified Yelpers completely erase the star rating of anyone who is not a certified Yelper which put their practice at a 1 star. They have noticed a significant drop in business since that review was left. The crazy thing is that they know this person did not come in because of the timing and even the Yelp reviewer says he/she does know anything about the Dr (my brother in law) or actual service but the front desk customer service was terrible in his/her opinion. So all the reviews are still there, hidden in a drop down below the certified Yelp reviewer comment but they do not factor into the rating which is the first thing any user is going to see on a google search. You basically have to know there are other comments not factored into the rating and be looking for them to find them.

Heres the kicker. They call Yelp to see what their options are and they can get all of the review combined for a rating if they pay Yelp several hundred dollars a month for some kind of subscription. They've spoken to their search engine optimizer and he confirmed that is the only way around it he has seen and that small businesses run into this all the time. I'm suspicious so I'm looking into this certified reviewer and comparing him/her to other reviewers.

Here is what I find: no name just a KA as name which from other reviews looks uncommon. No picture, also uncommon. No Yelp friends which looks very uncommon. So there is nothing to confirm who they are at all? This doesn't feel legit. You can look at each of a reviewers reviews and this "certified Yelp reviewer" has 15 of which 12 are 1 star 2 are 2 star and 1 is five star. All those reviews are of small businesses except one of Geico. Almost all of them are situations where the reviewer didn't use the business but thought the front desk was rude or never got a call back on a message he/she left or a scheduler must have screwed up and the person never arrived to preform the service. Several of those business actually write back and tell her she must have confused the business or called the wrong number because they had no messages like what he/she is describing. Two businesses offer her free service for a second chance and want to hear more but she never gets back to them. One business describes being in the same situation as my brother in law where they have lots of reviewers but the only one that shows up is this one.

My gut tells me either competitors are paying this person for poor reviews or Yelp itself is paying this person to push business to them by seeking companies that clearly care about Yelp because they get non certified reviewers frequently but don't pay for services. I did some additional research and ironically Elite Yelpers (I think this is what my Bro in law called certified reviewers) are supposed to be bumped up because of their active use of Yelp, activity in the Yelp community and the legitimacy of their reviews. If that is the case my gut tells me it is actually Yelp that is using their medium to strong arm businesses in to using them so that they don't look like they have poor services. No way is this user legit with no picture, name or friends where other non Elite users posting to my Bro and law's page have a name, a pic, more reviews and Yelp friends. Pretty great scam actually and seems like a pretty great class action lawsuit for some big law firm with the skills to figure it out.