Someone is threatening bad reviews unless you pay

The answer is the same as for any extortion. Do not pay, do not engage, and do not try to resolve it by offering money or free work, because paying invites more. Document it, report it through the right channels, and treat it as the crime it is.

What to do

• Do not pay and do not reply beyond preserving the evidence. Paying marks you as someone who will pay again.
• Preserve everything: screenshots of the demand and the threats, the numbers, profiles and timestamps, and the reviews themselves.
• Use the platform's extortion route. The major map platform now has a dedicated form for exactly this, and its trust team can remove confirmed-extortion reviews, often within days. Generalise the same step to any platform's abuse channel.
• Report it to the police or your national fraud reporting service. An unwarranted demand backed by a threat is blackmail or extortion in every country this guide covers, carrying serious penalties.

The honest middle, and the limit

There is a line worth getting right. A genuinely aggrieved customer saying "I will leave a bad review if you do not sort this out" is usually asserting a real grievance, even if it is uncomfortable, and that is not extortion. It becomes a crime when the person knows they have no real claim and is using the threat purely to extract money or free work. So the test is whether the demand is warranted, not whether it is unpleasant. The limit: report only genuine extortion, and resist the urge to mass-report ordinary negative reviews as "extortion" without proof, because false reporting can rebound on your own profile. Keep the line clean, and the law is firmly on your side.