I have a big problem with a criminal competitor

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Tim van Iersel: 🤔not really a criminal. Just a competitor that uses black hat methods to gain rankings. Would report it on Twitter to someone from the Google webspam team. If they think that google algorithms aren’t going to fix the issue then they can give the site(s) a manual penalty
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  Moshe Mo: Tim van Iersel thank you for your advise. Btw, the competitor is a known criminal in my city.
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  Benj Arriola: Just type in Google: Google Spam Report, it’s typically the first result where you can report this to Google.
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  Moshe Mo: Benj Arriola Thank you. Do you know anything about the success rates?
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  Benj Arriola: Moshe Mo from how I believe it works, the more that complain about it, it will probably get the attention more. I do not suggest spamming the google spam report though, they know if the report is coming from multiple people. And my suspicion from this point is where it now goes in the hands of the manual reviewers. And if they see what you are seeing and is a valid report, they will take action. How fast? I don’t know. I am not even sure that is the process. But I personally know some manual reviewers that work for google but all they know is they receive sites to review in a ticketing system. They do not know how they got there.
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  Moshe Mo: Benj Arriola thanks very much! I’ll try the twitter strategy next to the report then.