Do you have to be a customer to leave a Yelp review? Nope!

Here’s a scary loophole to Yelp’s content guidelines: what if someone has an interaction with your business, but doesn’t actually do business with you?

Here’s a review that someone left for a plumber in Redwood City:

Her chief complaint is that she was not a customer, so is this still a legitimate review? There’s nothing about the subject in their content guidelines or terms of service, so I decided to flag the review to force a response out of them. A couple of days later, this landed in my inbox:

As of today, 3/24/2015, the review is still prominently featured on Stanley’s Yelp page, along with seven other reviews, instead of being filtered out with the other 10.