Follow Up on MGA Garage Door Yelp Laundering

 Posted on September 07, 2018 in Uncategorized

Brad commented on Spotting Review Yelp Laundering:

If you check the WHOIS for MGA (whose physical address on Yelp is an apartment complex) on GoDaddy, the registrant for MGA's website is "Lior Mi" - at Grand Garage Door's physical address.

So Grand Garage Door and MGA Garage Door are run by the same people. Good to know.

I ran that physical address on the Harris County Appraisal District website, and found that it is a house belonging to Lior Mizrahi-"Lior Mi."

The Texas Secretary of State associates Mr. Mizrahi with several other businesses, including "Garage Door Cowboys":

"GDS Team" is MGA.

Garage Door Cowboys is an Austin Company. It has a Yelp review from "David S." in Rancho Cucamonga. David is a garage-door-repair connoisseur. Also a review from Yaniv P. in Austin-I don't think I've ever met a Yaniv. But look: David S. and Yaniv P. are Yelp friends.

It's easy to fall down this Israeli-name-fake-review rabbithole: take David S.'s other friend Gilad B., from Roseville, California (whose picture caught my attention): two reviews, one of them five stars for a garage-door-repair company.

The name "Lior Mizrahi" gives us another way of peeling this particular onion.

There's a Lior M. in Houston on Yelp. Lior has seven reviews, including five stars for "Mainland Investment" (see the Secretary of State screen shot, which includes a line for "Mainland Finance Limited Liability Company") and-surprise, surprise-five stars for MGA Garage Door, on November 23, 2014.

Lior's review of what appears to be his own company is in Yelp's deprecated reviews of that company, of which there are 31.

If Yelp's friends are listed in reverse chronological order, his oldest friend is Adi A. in Houston. One of Adi A.'s two reviews is for MGA Garage Door...sorta:

(It's also in the deprecated reviews.) MGA or GDS? Nobody knows!

Here is a list of Yelp's deprecated 5-star reviews for MGA. There are 27 of them. Some of them review GDS and Mainland Investments (other Mizrahi businesses) and Clean Air Houston Pro (a DBA of EOON Inc., registered agent Shlomi Ben Hamo, for future reference), which we saw in yesterday's post.

So the great majority of MGA's five-star reviews on Yelp are fraudulent. Caveat emptor.