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Restaurant Ibid chef-owner makes police report on alleged reviews scam
The Straits Times
|November 10, 2025
It is not unusual for a restaurant to receive bad reviews, but being bombarded by numerous scathing one-star reviews over the course of a day led chef Woo Wai Leong to believe his restaurant was the target of a scam.
The chef-owner of Asian fusion fine-dining Restaurant Ibid in North Canal Road took to Instagram Stories on Nov 7 to share his account.
“We have been the target of a scam attempting to extract payment to take down a string of Il bad Google reviews,” he wrote.
The inaugural winner of competitive cooking game show Master Chef Asia 2015 added that the allegedly fake reviews were from “suspicious accounts with zero other reviews”. Also, the comments were “generic with no identifying text regarding the typical Restaurant Ibid experience”.
Woo, 37, added that he subsequently received WhatsApp messages from an overseas number. The sender claimed he had another 300 bad reviews lined up, and was “offering to take down the reviews for a fee”.
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