How to Combat Fraudulent Negative Reviews for my Business?

I'm not sure about "pushing" the bad ones down, but to outrank them, you will need to build backlinks on sites/blogs/forums that are relevant to your niche. You should also target ones with a PR of at least 1, but the higher the better.

As for software, yes there are programs to automate these tasks however they can only do what you set them up to do.

Have you tried contacting these ripoff report sites directly? Perhaps you could explain your situation and get them removed. Might or might not help, but its worth a shot.

Your going to have to pay people to bring it down or boost up seo and rank higher than all the bad reviews

You will have to rank multiple properties on page one to push them down (hint - rank your own twitter profile and Facebook page for your name. That's two spots down).

I know it's not much, but why not just give your side? Something like this:

"Hi there. I'm (name) from (business), and I'd like to give my side.

The person who posted the review above (or wherever it's positioned) is likely
a competitor of mine I feel isn't being completely honest here. He claims he's
bought a product for $100K, but is actually fake. (Add more facts and details
you can afford to.)

I invite anyone to try me out at (website address), or contact me at (contact
info) so you can find out more (or better if you can by saying 'so I can gladly
tell you more myself'). I'm sure you can tell truth from fiction, and I thank you
for taking time to read this."

If you can also afford it, maybe put a link or coupon code for someone to get
a limited discount. Mention your product is normally worth X price, but you're
doing this because you want to help lessen the consumer's risk or so and gain
their trust.

Anyway, that's what I'd do if I'm in your shoes. I don't have complete control
over what's out there, but I can do something about it on my side.

Trusting this helps. And good luck.

Most of them allow you to respond, don't they? I would give them your side of the story, plus get to work on backlinks to outrank them. A competitor, you say? Give it right back to them and do the same.

Yes. You can also find people on fiverr who write positive reviews from different proxies to help to push the bad reviews down

if they have been posted in a forum, then make yourself a profile and write your side as suggested - people will read the whole threads. if its blogs which have been made you can even just make your own on the same network write good reviews and outrank your silly competitor whos playing kiddy games. - you can lower the rank of the bad reviews, just OUTrank them with either your own content.

companies charge a lot to do this, you can outsource people to write reviews for your business in various places, and use automated SEO tools such as SENukeX to quickly rank them for your business name -

sometimes automation isnt so bad