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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

#111

Post by memco »

gordo4 wrote: post #94
duiker101 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OsmAnd is far superior to Google Maps in my opinion, especially for backcountry offline navigation. It's one of the most important apps when traveling abroad or when cell service is spotty. Google Maps is basically useless in rural South America, for example... and OSM is actually more up to date than Google Maps when it comes to river crossings, etc... and POI data is available for offline use. Google Maps can't eve…

> Google Maps can't even do offline navigation and rerouting.

The iOS Google maps does offline navigation. I used it just this weekend on a long distance trip. You have to download the data beforehand, but if you have downloaded the data for a region you can search and route to any destination you want.

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

#113

Post by tinix »

ant6n wrote: post #101
gordo4 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OsmAnd is far superior to Google Maps in my opinion, especially for backcountry offline navigation. It's one of the most important apps when traveling abroad or when cell service is spotty. Google Maps is basically useless in rural South America, for example... and OSM is actually more up to date than Google Maps when it comes to river crossings, etc... and POI data is available for offline use. Google Maps can't eve…

Is that the ugly one where you have to download huge regions to offline just to look at where you at right now?

Huge? Not so much... OsmAnd uses vector maps, which are very small, compared to "offline" Google Maps tiles.

A couple hundred megabytes for an entire country's road system is not "huge".

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

#114

Post by rlyshw »

In college I was somehow made the owner or something of my department building’s google maps entry. I worked for the department, so my .edu google account was in some admin/staff group I guess. I kept getting emails asking me to update the listing and definitely considered some harmless pranks/light vandalism.

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

#115

Post by soared »

starik36 wrote: post #98
ksherlock wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one? http://pageburgers.com/directions.html Google maps has an image capture from May 2018 with their sign up.

I know. https://i.imgur.com/s5qesHC.jpg Except, the restaurant is not there. None of the signs are on the building except for Lake Powell Realty. Not the "Restaurant" sign on the left, not the CNG Burgers sign in the middle. And the reviews kept on coming even after we left.

So its closed and google hasn’t removed it. The restaurant bought some fake reviews that are still coming in.

This isn’t a scam like the article is talking about, just google failing to update a listing and letting in bad reviews.

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

#117

Post by sytelus »

I've considered myself fairly resistive to various devious scamming efforts but recently they have upped the game at completely new level. Other day I received text message that my XYZ card had suspicious charge and my card was disabled. To re-enable the card I must call 1-800- number. I absolutely believed that! That number is in fact fake number to get all your bank details!

These are clear attempt for theft. For physical attempts I would call police and that's one of the big restraint on rampant theft attempts. But there is no law enforcement infrastructure set up to report and act on electronic thefts easily. These thieves can easily be traced otherwise as their 1-800- numbers are public.

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

#118

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

starik36 wrote: post #93

There is some scam going on in Lake Powell, AZ. We visited there in September and yelped a well reviewed place: CNG Burgers. We arrive there and can't find it. It simply isn't there. And not just isn't there - there is NO trace of it on the building that matched the address (like where there would a lighter shade of paint behind where the restaurant sign was - at least according to the photos on Google Maps). Oh well…

There's a new business model where a restaurant is just a kitchen that delivers. No need for a dining place. Uber eats and such give new restaurant owners the flexibility. Given that the majority of new restaurants fail within 5 years, this is a great option. This could be the case with CNG Burgers.

Some companies decide that they should have a physical address for places like Yelp. I suspect you have to have an address for people to review your business.

Is it a scam? In some sense yes but what do you if all you want to do is deliver?

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

#119

Post by techsupporter »

mikeash wrote: post #29
techsupporter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They had numbers from back when people faced in-state toll charges on phone calls, and since they covered an entire large metropolitan area, they had at that time registered numbers in several local exchanges, to make customer calls to them a local call (just pick the number having a local or non-toll exchange). Totally unrelated to people scamming others on Google, but I love little bits of telephone trivia like t…

You might enjoy this. I was growing up in the countryside in the late 80s when BBSs and services like AOL started to take off. We were too far away from anything like a city for them to be a local call, so my use of them was extremely limited. I had a friend who lived a few miles closer to the nearest city and they were a local call for him, so we’d always spend a lot of time on the BBSs at his place. Eventually we c…

I do enjoy this, thanks. It reminded me of another memory: Growing up, my house sat on the border between two of the incumbents. It was odd enough that dialing the Operator got the pre-connection announcement for the incumbent that mailed us the phone bill but calling Information (411) got the pre-connection announcement for the adjacent city's incumbent.

This also happened to make my hometown one of a handful that could call local numbers served by either incumbent in the same area code. I was doing work for a tiny ISP and my boss asked my parents if he could put a Livingston PortMaster 16 in our house and hook up 16 phone lines in exchange for paying my parents a small sum and giving us free Internet access by sharing the connection with the PortMaster.

We agreed and, thus, I became one of the few teenagers at the time to have high-speed wired Internet at my house. (None of my peers gave a crap but I loved it.) The phone company was less overjoyed because we consumed every available pair in the cross-connect box at the end of the street and nobody on our block or the next one over could get an additional phone line for months until a new box was added.

(As a capper to the story: A second cross-connect was added...but the tiny ISP went bankrupt a month later and all 16 of those lines were disconnected, rendering the shiny new cross-connect pointless.)

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

#120

Post by azernik »

gordo4 wrote: post #94
duiker101 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OsmAnd is far superior to Google Maps in my opinion, especially for backcountry offline navigation. It's one of the most important apps when traveling abroad or when cell service is spotty. Google Maps is basically useless in rural South America, for example... and OSM is actually more up to date than Google Maps when it comes to river crossings, etc... and POI data is available for offline use. Google Maps can't eve…

It can absolutely do offline navigation - you have to tell it to download an area offline, but if you start navigation for a route that passes through out-of-the-way areas it'll prompt you to download the offline maps.
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