"I recently had the pleasure of being a patient"
A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
21–30 of 150 posts
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#22I remember this being especially bad for certain niches like locksmiths. In that space, someone would create fake businesses and then take the leads they got via phone, email, websites, etc, and then refer the business to some actual locksmith. With probably heavy mark-up to cover the referral fee.
It's worse actually, people create GMB accounts for their competitors and list their phone number.
Anyway, aren't they doing address verification with snail mail nowadays?
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person com…
Maybe nobody's trying to game Yelp because it's not the 800lb gorilla?
That's very possible - reviews by obscurity or something. Although I really feel like 10 years ago the roles of Google and Yelp were very much reversed here. Changing times changing strategies I suppose.
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person com…
I wouldn't give Yelp too much praise. It's been alleged that Yelp engages in astroturfing and unfair business practices[0], and the documentary "Billion Dollar Bully"[1] even accuses them of "Mob-Like Behavior". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully
Oh definitely - I can't say that I've had stellar experiences with Yelp in the past for restaurants, barbers, etc, from the consumer side, and I hear it is much worse as a business. I was just very surprised that in this niche Google performed so poorly and Yelp so well. I wouldn't go on to generalize from this experience though.
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#25My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.) The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutti…
So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person com…
This happened to me in New York, City in 2015 or so. Fun times. Really nice to understand after all these years what happened!
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#26These fake reviews are easier to identify. No profile photo, they typically have one or two 5 star reviews. If you click on few reviews of a business and if you see this pattern then most likely they are fake. In the past I want to choose a mover and this particular business has 4.9 stars with over 300 reviews. There is no way a mover can have this rating. I clicked on atleast 50 reviewers and all of them have only o…
Your fake-meter is trivially easy to bypass with a few 3- and 4-star reviews and a fake DALL-E profile photo. This is already seen quite often in the wild.
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#27chatGPT hallucinates, Google shows fakes, not very different. Nobody can solve this problem
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#28Algorithmic and AI failures like this are starting to pave the way towards curation by skilled knowledge workers. Is anyone actually working on this again?
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#29I remember this being especially bad for certain niches like locksmiths. In that space, someone would create fake businesses and then take the leads they got via phone, email, websites, etc, and then refer the business to some actual locksmith. With probably heavy mark-up to cover the referral fee.
It's worse actually, people create GMB accounts for their competitors and list their phone number. Anyway, aren't they doing address verification with snail mail nowadays?
They get around address verification with mailbox rentals at places like the UPS store, or other places like it.
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#30My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.) The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutti…
The video calls must be new. When I first made a Google My Business profile, there was no verification. Not even address verification. And then I couldn't get the listing delisted from Google either (my friend made a prank listing). At some point they added postcard by mail verification. Then they added having to upload documents (articles of organization, pictures of store). And then the last time my account got sus…
One thing I don't understand is why many or most of these fake businesses weren't thwarted by postcard verification. I could only come up with a couple possibilities:
- Google stopped doing postcard verification, or a loophole in the creation process lets savvy scammers avoid it (like an alternate verification method or providing a different address for the postcard).
- New business entries go live before the postcard verification, and that period is long and lucrative enough to be worth exploiting.
- They're paying local property owners to accept a postcard and read them the number - postcard mules. That seems hard to scale as big as some of these networks. Two of the "chains" had dozens of locations in one metro, all seemingly created in the same month or so. Also, some of the addresses seem like multi-unit commercial buildings where one person wouldn't receive a postcard.