Moving Company Realizes It Probably Shouldn’t Have Threatened Lawsuit Over Negative Yelp Review

Image courtesy of (1918.com)

(1918.com)

Yesterday, we told about the Massachusetts moving company that decided it would be a good idea to threaten a Yelp reviewer with a lawsuit if she didn’t remove the review ASAP. Now the movers are saying they don’t want the review deleted, just corrected.

After his story appeared on Consumerist, Phil Buckley contacted us with an update. He had just spoken to the moving company’s sale manager, the same man who wrote the legal letter demanding that Phil’s wife delete her review.

“He said that he just wanted to try to explain things, ‘because maybe emotions have been running amok,'” Phil recalls. “He then talked at length about how assessing damages works in the the moving business.”

Phil explained to the sales manager that his issue wasn’t with the way his in-law’s move had been handled — it was the whole “threatening a libel lawsuit over an 18-month-old Yelp review” thing.

The manager admitted to Phil that maybe the legal letter was not the right way to reach out to unhappy customers, and that he no longer expects Phil’s wife Kristen to remove the review.

He did, however, insist that Kristen’s review had incorrect numbers regarding damages and reimbursements, and he promised to forward copied of checks that would show that her info was inaccurate.

Phil tells Consumerist that if documentation is provided to show that the review is inaccurate, it will be edited to reflect the correct information.

The manager also said that he felt the tone of the Yelp review implied that it would be removed if the movers were to pay out more money for the alleged damages that occurred during the move.

“I can tell you that was not and is not the goal of that review,” Phil tells Consumerist. “The review was an honest outpouring of frustration with a below average moving experience.”

When pressed by Phil to confirm whether or not the movers intended to move forward with the threat of a lawsuit, the sales manager wouldn’t say no, but Phil’s impression is that this matter has no future in a courtroom.

Before getting off the phone, Phil, whose research into the movers’ online reviews turned up indicators that someone may have been trying — poorly — to manipulate review scores, offered the sales manager this one bit of unsolicited advice:

“Whatever company they are using to post good reviews for them, they should fire them because they are terrible.”

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