Don't pay. Don't engage publicly.
Paying once trains the ecosystem. We've seen owners pay $300 only to get a second demand two weeks later from a different account. Screenshot everything — the review, the email, headers, timestamps — before the sender deletes their message.
Do not post on your business page accusing someone of extortion. Yelp sometimes interprets that as harassment of a reviewer and it muddies your later dispute. Keep the evidence chain clean and offline.
Report through the right channels
File a Yelp dispute citing extortion and harassment. Attach the email thread. Yelp has removed reviews in extortion cases when the evidence is unambiguous, though they won't comment on it publicly.
Depending on your state, review extortion may qualify for a police report or FBI IC3 filing. Having a case number strengthens your platform escalation even if law enforcement doesn't pursue it. Several of our clients got faster Yelp action after documenting a filed report.
When the review survives the first pass
Extortion reviews sometimes stay up after the first dispute because Yelp treats them as he-said-she-said. Legal correspondence to the poster — identifying them through subpoena pathways if needed — changes the calculus fast.
This is exactly the workflow our Yelp Review Removal team runs under time pressure. The first 24 hours of documentation often determine whether the case resolves in two weeks or six months.