Comment by rkalla

For anyone on the fence about the claims, 20/20 did an investigation[1] of the BBB and found exactly the same thing. They worked with companies with complaints against them and low ratings that were called by BBB representatives asking them to re-up their registrations.

Without much coaxing the BBB agents clarified that the ratings could be "reinstated" or "take care of" if the signup process was completed. Once the businesses did that, in every case, the scores were re-adjusted to A or A+ for those companies.

Conversely, companies that didn't re-up would have all their past complaints re-instated on their review page and scores drop to C/D/F levels.

Not unlike the Yelp stuff we saw going on last week or the week before here on HN.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw