Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

According to a Wall Street Journal report, millions of Google listings contain false information like phone numbers that reroute to competing businesses.

Approximately 11 million false business have been seen masquerading and hiding in plan site on Google Maps. “These scammers use a wide range of deceptive techniques to try to game our system,” Ethan Russell, Product Director for Google Maps, explains, adding that “as we shut them down, they change their techniques, and the cycle continues.”

Each month, Google adds more than 200 million places to its map service and claims to “connect people to businesses more than nine billion times, including more than one billion phone calls and three billion requests for directions.”

The problem is that, according to the WSJ, “hundreds of thousands of false listings sprout on Google Maps each month,” and so these queries are “overrun with millions of false business addresses and fake names… luring the unsuspecting to what appear to be Google-suggested local businesses, a costly and dangerous deception.”

“Despite implementing strict policies and tools that enable people to flag these issues so we can take action,” Google admits “it’s a constant balancing act and we’re continually working on new and better ways to fight these scams using a variety of ever-evolving manual and automated systems.”

“Scammers on Google Maps 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. They even existed back when business listings were printed, bound and delivered to your doorstep. We take these issues very seriously and have been using a wide array of techniques and approaches to limit abuse on our platforms.”

Google published a blog post soon after the story went live with information about the fake Maps listings. However, most of the numbers were already mentioned in the WSJ report.

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