Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

Background: My wife works as an administrator at a Canadian cosmetic surgery clinic. The physician, Dr. C., is quite successful and is ranked #1 in our city on sites like RateMD.

Yesterday, she was cold-called by an SEO startup in an attempt to sell her a revamped website and SEO services. He said they had already designed a placeholder website, and that he would personalize it for them if the clinic would purchase their services. She politely refused.

Out of curiosity, her colleague, J, called the phone number on this fictional web site. J pretended to be a potential client and asked to schedule a consultation. The other party said "The doctor is currently busy; I'll check with him and call you back." J asked which physician she would be seeing. He gave her the name of Dr. C (the physician at J's clinic!) along with his background and credentials (gleaned from the bio on Dr. C's website). When pressed for the clinic's location, they gave J a (fake) address in Chinatown.

My wife then called the SEO company to complain that they seemed to be impersonating a legitimate clinic in order to sell SEO services (she did not mention J's call). The person she spoke to (listed as one of co-founders) became very rude. He denied that they were doing anything wrong and huffed that "If you don't want to grow your Web presence then we don't want your business!"

I believe that this is an attempted "growth hack" and not an outright scam, but they are taking it too far. Using a real physician's identity, even in a placeholder website, can damage his reputation, not to mention displacing him as #1 in Google search results for our city.

HN, do you have any thoughts on what action my wife can take to stop this behavior?

Update 1: Interestingly, the fake clinic domain name is VERY similar (one letter difference) to another, legitimate clinic in the city.

Update 2: Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons is in contact with wife's clinic. Preparing to unleash the hounds, no doubt.

The company might do that to other people as well. Even if you find only 2-3 other people then a judge would see it as systematic fraud with higher penalties.

I just hope the SEO company isn't hiding in another country.

SEO companies, especially the shady ones in my experience, like to be particularly litigious.

Is there an equivalent of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in Canada? Contacting the BBB and filing a claim is definitely a way to get some momentum, lots of businesses in the USA at least depend on having a good, clean BBB rating.

Your wife (or someone) should report it to the professional license/medical board, basically whomever handles licensing and advertising for professionals in Canada. Not even so much to attack the SEO company, but to protect the Physician should a complaint ever be lodged against him/her. Doing so will likely also start an investigation though, so it will work out.

You may be right that the SEO company is trying to do a growth hack, but that doesn't alleviate them of the responsibility to not break the law. In the US you can get into some decent trouble doing that crap. You might get away with it once or twice claiming ignorance to the standards on registered professionals in a state but I doubt you get away with it long once someone reports you.

Also, I personally wouldn't name anyone publicly here, it just doesn't seem like a good idea. However, sending an email to the SEO company seems reasonable.

I remember meeting some French guys in one of SF's startup accelerators who had a similar startup - to create websites for small businesses from crawled data and do serious SEO for these websites, then once customers inquiry or try to register for appointments online or whatnot, they would send the original business an email saying something along the lines of "claim your website - you have customers waiting". While it definitely seems to be in a gray area - it does sound like a decent idea... Could someone with a legal background comment on the legality of this?