First, the Wall Street Journal posted this article about fake businesses hijacking legitimate business names on Google Maps:
The ruse lures the unsuspecting to what appear to be Google-suggested local businesses, a costly and dangerous deception. A man arrived at Ms. Carter’s home in an unmarked van and said he was a company contractor. He wasn’t. After working on the garage door, he asked for $728, nearly twice the cost of previous repairs, Ms. Carter said. He demanded cash or a personal check, but she refused. “I’m at my house by myself with this guy,” she said. “He could have knocked me over dead.” The repairman had hijacked the name of a legitimate business on Google Maps and listed his own phone number.
Google responded to the article with this detailed post. From that post:
We get millions of contributions each day (like new business profiles, reviews, star ratings, and more) and the vast majority of these contributions are helpful and accurate. But occasionally, business scammers take advantage of local listings to make a profit. They do things like charge business owners for services that are actually free, defraud customers by posing as real businesses, and impersonate real businesses to secure leads and then sell them. Even though fake business profiles are a small percentage of the overall business profiles on Google, local business scammers have been a thorn in the internet’s side for over a decade.
And:
We have an entire team dedicated to addressing these issues and taking constant action to remove profiles that violate our policies.
Google goes on to run through numbers, showing how many scams they’ve shut down. Which sort of goes to the point, I think. The problem exists, is massive, and Google is doing all they can, short of making businesses certify themselves in some verifiable way.
A formal verification process would be costly. As is, Google depends on the unpaid public to report fraudulent businesses. Caveat emptor.
“Google is doing all they can, short of making businesses certify themselves in some verifiable way.
A formal verification process would be costly”
Agreed! They should make verifiable verification mandatory. Cost should be included as the cost of doing business.
I hate when companies say things like, “the vast majority of these contributions are helpful and accurate.” It isn’t the vast majority that is the problem. That’s just an excuse.
All (or at least the vast majority) of valid businesses have to register their business name with the state in which they operate and any in a city generally have to get a business license. This is public data. A formal verification process wouldn’t seem to be that impossible or costly, especially for a technology company like Google.
My experience is that it takes >6 weeks for Google to remove the business, and about 50% of the time it doesn’t get removed.
I’m not saying they are slow on purpose, but the law of large numbers says that they probably won’t get any faster or become more responsive.
Seems to me that if you choose to offer these sort of listings to the public, as Google is here, you are bound to accept the costs associated with making them accurate. If you can’t afford the staff necessary to run an accurate service, then maybe you shouldn’t enter the business.
Lets say I wanted to offer a different yellow pages back in the day, and used these sort of excuses to explain why i thought most of the listings were accurate, but my team couldn’t check every listing, would I get the kind of pass google expects here?