With a little bit of investigation, you can see this headline is alarmist. These aren't hijackings, they are just restaurants who are authorizing other companies to manage their online presence.
I don't doubt that these restaurants might have authorized these companies to do this by signing a contract that they didn't read fully or understand. It may have been completely legal, but it's still taking advantage of these restaurants' lack of internet savvy and awareness. I spoke to them and 4 out of 4 were not aware they had authorized anything and asked me to fix it immediately. Each case varies in severity, but all the motives behind each of these cases could have been done strategically and in a way that did not compromise the restaurant's website traffic. They could add online ordering to their website. Their profiles were hijacked for a side agenda of the company who made the site.
seems a little sketch to me to be creating external domains which would be competing with the main website. like having bar pintxo's menu on a .org with google places linked to it and being ranked #1 on google. i don't see many restaurant owners agreeing to that. its one thing to have the menu under a subdomain its quite another to be competing for the same traffic. seriously?
Check out SouthATL's posting history, and that of his twin mmmmmmmmmm. These accounts were created nearly a year ago and sat without any activity whatsoever until just now. This matches the pattern of aged accounts owned by brokers that are available on major social networking accounts for sale to PR reps who need to post from an account that appears to be other than a brand new one.
These posters will not be able to validate their identity.
This is as standard and common pattern these days which is identified fairly easily.