Anyone reading the V1 SEO blog recently will know I have been running my own personal campaign about microdata abuse and the Google review stars that show in the Google results – Google reviews stars in Google results Manipulation Exposed
I’ve been hoping that someone from Google would read my posts on the topic and look in to removing all stars from showing in the SERPs until they have a way of ensuring reviews are genuine, although in my opinion that wouldn’t go far enough as showing stars in Google results only seems to reward those who know how to get them to appear, rather than genuine good businesses / services / products etc.
Well, nothing regarding the stars has happened and they still show, but what has happened is the V1 SEO Google Places listing appears to have been removed 
Is this a case of Google shooting the messenger ?
Turns out it was just a bug in Google Places.
Lots of people have been reporting the same issue, when going to where their Google Places listing they were getting a Google error message saying Google Maps: We Currently Do Not Support The Location
Google have now posted the following message at the top of the Google Places Help Forum,
“We’ve recently experienced technical issues with Places and you may have experienced your verified listing no longer appearing on Maps. We’ve put a fix in place and listings should be appearing now. If the problem persists, go to your dashboard and select Edit > Submit, and See this thread for more info.”
It worked.. We were not abusing the system as we actually had a high number of reviews posted on our site, however, any pages that had microdata show a number of reviews over the amount posted in google places, the stars have been removed from the organic listings. However on deeper pages where the reviews are within 1 or 2 of the amount on the google places page, those stars stay.