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Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

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Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#81

Post by ams6110 »

askvictor wrote: post #49
olivermarks wrote: post #26

I check phone numbers with yellowpages.com if I'm unsure, we've come full circle...

How do you know this is legit? Does the yellow pages verify every listing? If a company neglects to register a yellow pages slot, how hard is it for someone else to register it? Genuine questions (and I'd guess it changes by country); Google does a fair bit of effort to get business owner to claim their property on Google (again, probably changes by country); if they don't do so, then how different is it to someone n…

You have to pay to be in the yellow pages, so that both discourages scammers and provides identity confirmation (bank account or credit card number)

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#82

Post by black-tea »

dawnerd wrote: post #6

I do a lot of Google Maps moderation and there’s a ton of bad changes being attempted every day. Honestly I’m amazed Google doesn’t bother to vet anyone really. Becoming a local guide is easy and not that difficult for a spam group to create enough fake accounts to get things pushed through. Just last night I caught the local Target that was reclassified as a “prison”. What Google needs to do is lock information for…

Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#83

Post by duiker101 »

black-tea wrote: post #82
dawnerd wrote: post #6

I do a lot of Google Maps moderation and there’s a ton of bad changes being attempted every day. Honestly I’m amazed Google doesn’t bother to vet anyone really. Becoming a local guide is easy and not that difficult for a spam group to create enough fake accounts to get things pushed through. Just last night I caught the local Target that was reclassified as a “prison”. What Google needs to do is lock information for…

Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.

Honestly for me it boils down to Google maps being just a superior app. It's not even the amount of data in itself(which is a lot already tbh) but just the app being better. I don't think I have seen a decent OSM app yet.

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#84

Post by neolefty »

black-tea wrote: post #82
dawnerd wrote: post #6

I do a lot of Google Maps moderation and there’s a ton of bad changes being attempted every day. Honestly I’m amazed Google doesn’t bother to vet anyone really. Becoming a local guide is easy and not that difficult for a spam group to create enough fake accounts to get things pushed through. Just last night I caught the local Target that was reclassified as a “prison”. What Google needs to do is lock information for…

Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.

It benefits other Google Maps users.

Is it actively bad to moderate Google Maps?

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#85

Post by namibj »

amenghra wrote: post #33
nordsieck wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In turn, I'm amazed that people put effort into databases that are owned by companies. Wouldn't it be much more fulfilling to do the same work for an open database, such as open street maps? There are tons of open source developers who contribute to code bases that require copyright assignment. They probably do it for the same reasons: * It's personally useful * It's useful to a lot of people * It's (comparatively)…

Most companies require a CLA. A CLA is not automatically equivalent to handing over copyright to the contribution. In some cases, the company is asking for a license to use+distribute the code (which IMHO should be implied by open a PR in the first place). For example, you can read Square’s CLA here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeRVQ35-gq2vdSxD1kd...

GPL skips the issue due to the PR having to be GPL to even be published. AGPL might be an issue though? Would it need to be explicit? Still, GPL.

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#86

Post by [deleted] »

black-tea wrote: post #82
dawnerd wrote: post #6

I do a lot of Google Maps moderation and there’s a ton of bad changes being attempted every day. Honestly I’m amazed Google doesn’t bother to vet anyone really. Becoming a local guide is easy and not that difficult for a spam group to create enough fake accounts to get things pushed through. Just last night I caught the local Target that was reclassified as a “prison”. What Google needs to do is lock information for…

Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.

[deleted]

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#87

Post by panic »

neolefty wrote: post #84
black-tea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.

It benefits other Google Maps users. Is it actively bad to moderate Google Maps?

Exactly—OpenStreetMap would get more contributions if they had more users. People want to help others, but it's not clear how contributing to OSM does this when so few people use their website.

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#88

Post by reaperducer »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #77

I got burned by a similar scam with information changes in google. I was looking for a specific restaurant in google and used the given address to get there. When I got there I found out it was a different restaurant. I asked about the other restaurant and they told me the other restaurant had gone out of business. A complete lie. I'm sure they hired a company to promote them and they used this trick to increase thei…

Could very well be a scam. Or it could just be that the big tech companies really suck at information verification.

My small company gets three or four phone calls or e-mails a week from people who think it's a different business, and each time I ask, they say they got the number from Google.

Looking at my e-mail, the most recent one was from someone who wanted to place a big catering order with a Subway sandwich shop about 2,000 miles away.

I don't blame Google exclusively, though. For almost ten years, Facebook has been telling people that I am a large building in another state.

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#89

Post by namibj »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #72
mattnewton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or drop people: “Scammers are changing the contact info for banks on Google Maps to defraud”

The the is supefluous too: "Scammers changing contact details of banks on Google Maps [to defraud]". But the "defraud" coming at the end and not being just "fraud" is poor in English. However, "scammers" are pretty much synonymous with "fraudsters", so the "to defraud" is probably superfluous too.

I hope you apply the same reductionism to problem solving as well.

Got any tips on using it in practice (you seem to be at a higher skill level than most)?

Re: Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

#90

Post by reaperducer »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #4
lwhi wrote: post #2

A local taxi company near me was relisted on Google maps using a pay-per-minute redirect service. The scammers get paid, and the customer is non the wiser until they get their bill. I was charged about £5 for a 30 second call.

What would be a legitimate use case for redirect services?

When they were big in the U.S. (976-xxxx days, before they moved to 900-xxx-xxxx), they were mostly astrologers, fortune tellers, and phone sex lines.

The only one I've seen in a very long time was for a psychic reading over the phone.

"I predict... you will lose a modest amount of money...."

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