JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Since opening his HVAC company in Jacksonville’s Pine Forest neighborhood less than two years ago, Aldi Gjeka has received 277 reviews on Google, 262 of which are five stars. The other 15 are one-star reviews, all of which were written within the same hour earlier this week.
“I get a notification that I got a one-star review, so it kind of threw me off,” said Gjeka, owner of ‘Florida Air Flow,’ “I was kind of freaking out because I was like, ‘where are these coming from?’ None of those people are my customers.”
After seeing the reviews, Gjeka sent Action News Jax a text message thread between him and a random iCloud email address that had initially texted him, claiming to be a ‘review provider’ who was apparently responsible for all of the new one-star reviews on Gjeka’s Google review page.
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The person who sent the text claimed to have been paid by one of Gjeka’s competitors to write 40 negative reviews about his business. They told Gjeka they ‘felt bad’ about it, but if he ‘made a deal’ they would remove all of the bad reviews and reveal who hired them, for a price.
“Originally, he wanted $150. He wanted me to send it through CashApp,” Gjeka said, “after I told him that I wasn’t going to send the money, next thing you know, within about a 15-minute period, I had 15 one-star reviews.”
After Gjeka shared his experience online, despite still having the one-star reviews on his Google page, he got in touch with George Silva, owner of ‘Fresh Look Painting’ in Apopka, who not only said he was also targeted by a negative review scam, but it was apparently by the same person.
“People were asking for money to remove the reviews. That got me stressed out for a minute,” Silva told Action News Jax.
We compared the one-star reviews between Gjeka and Silva’s businesses. They were made only a day apart and some were written by the same Google accounts.
“We’re trying to maintain the integrity of our business,” Silva said, “this is very damaging.”
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We reached out to the Jacksonville FBI office about this, asking if it had been made aware of Gjeka’s case or any similar local cases. The FBI office told us it could not confirm or deny the existence of such an investigation.
But the FBI’s annual internet crimes report from 2024, the most recent year available, says more people have been reporting more financial losses to cyber crimes around the U.S. year-over-year, at least since 2020.
The trend of negative review scams has become prevalent enough to where Google has launched a separate page for business owners to file a report, if they feel like they’ve been a victim. You can find a link to the site here, where Google stresses not to give any money to someone claiming to be a negative review provider, or anyone promising to delete negative reviews.
Gjeka said he’s not quite sure what his next best step is at the moment, aside from telling other businesses to watch out.
“I might be a target right now and I might be a victim of this, but at the end of the day, somebody else will be, too,” Gjeka said.
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