Here's a darker side of online platforms that often gets overlooked: coordinated fake review campaigns are becoming a serious threat to businesses worldwide.

Online extortionists have discovered a profit model—flooding Google Maps and review platforms with fabricated negative appraisals to damage a business's reputation, then demanding payment for removal. It's digital extortion at scale.

Why does this matter for Web3? Because it reveals a fundamental problem with centralized reputation systems. When a single platform controls how ratings and reviews are stored and displayed, bad actors can weaponize that system. There's no transparency, no immutability, no way to independently verify whether feedback is genuine.

This is exactly the kind of problem decentralized systems were designed to solve—imagine if business ratings were recorded on an immutable ledger, cryptographically signed by verified users, with transparent dispute resolution mechanisms. You couldn't simply spam false reviews into existence.

The current situation shows us that reputation is fragile when it depends on one entity's moderation efforts. Whether it's a local restaurant or a crypto protocol, the underlying principle is the same: trust breaks down without verifiable, tamper-proof records.

As more services move online and reputation becomes currency, this conversation about how we authenticate and preserve information authenticity becomes increasingly critical.