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Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps

blog.abhijittomar.com

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

#121

Post by signal11 »

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's not quite "pay", but Google have a notion of "points" to reward contributors, who they call local guides: https://support.google.com/local-guides/answer/6225851?hl=en

Anecdotally it's mostly credits towards Google's own products, free storage, etc, but also freebies like subscriptions to the NYTimes Crossword, etc -- at least at the lower levels.

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

#123

Post by ams6110 »

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

Yes it can, you have to download the area in advance but I use it offline all the time as I have no mobile data plan on my phone.

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

#124

Post by gniv »

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…

> What Google needs to do is lock information for verified businesses or businesses they’re directly scraping from the Corp location pages.

Here are a few problems with that:

1) Businesses also have incentives to spam by adding lots of vaguely-related words to names, categories and description.

2) Businesses forget that they claimed the listing, and so stale info remains locked for too long.

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

#125

Post by jpatokal »

tinix wrote: post #113
ant6n wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Like the mobile app itself, Google Maps offline maps are also vector based.

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

#126

Post by askvictor »

ams6110 wrote: post #81
askvictor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Probably a small price to pay for scammers, and I wonder/doubt if anyone actually confirms the details - yes, it might be possible after the fact, but by that point the damage is done.

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

#127

Post by deckar01 »

sytelus wrote: post #117

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 p…

If you are in the US you can submit reports to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

https://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx

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

#128

Post by jpatokal »

edent wrote: post #44
tommyanthony wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I work on maps spam. I was wondering if you could dig up a link to the maps business, and include a rough idea of when this occurred. Thanks!

I've tried to report this map spam before - details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/04/hundreds-of-thousands-of-sp... Happy to be contacted if you'd like more information.

Your blog post appears to be conflating Google Maps with MyMaps. MyMaps lets people create & publish their own maps with random POIs: for example, here's a map of nice wineries around Melbourne.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mtgpe7JU9OtHUUdvG_A6Uq0eTp...

However, these do not show up in the "main" Google Maps, and adding spam to them isn't any more effective than adding spam to a random website.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Google Maps.

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

#129

Post by Buge »

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…

>A complete lie.

How do you know it's a lie?

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

#130

Post by baroffoos »

superflyguy wrote: post #75
optimiz3 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google pay you to moderate? What is the user incentive to commit hours of time to a 3rd party commercial enterprise?

Stack overflow is pretty popular. Although their recent attempt to "be nice to new users" (which wasn't necessary before, and coincides with the quality of answers rapidly approaching that of Quota) suggests that this won't last forever.

Stackoverflow data is free for anyone to download and reuse. Gmaps is a proprietary dataset. Helping people on SO also feels a lot less like working for a tech megacorp for free.
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