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A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

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Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#131

Post by turtleyacht »

wendyshu wrote: post #127
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #6

My 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…

A difficult comment to understand. I had no idea what GBP was and had only a rough idea what was being said thereafter.

GBP is a Google Business Profile.

Someone can create a bunch of them, using some evasive techniques to avoid Google identifying them as one person.

When people call asking for service, that's a potential lead. This info could be sold to a contractor.

The other piece is making the GBP compelling enough--through fake reviews, submitted by web browsers running on separate IPs--to have folks contact them.

More ambitiously, the person doing this creates their own business, hiring out service crews to do the work and capturing more of the profit.

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#132

Post by mistrial9 »

jfoster wrote: post #115
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #6

My 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…

> they will quite literally start their own company and will hire At that point... Are they even fake anymore?

this is a serious question, and the answers bring the reader back to the fundamental promises of a civil society.. not at all simple

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#133

Post by citizenpaul »

troydavis wrote: post #58
sairahul82 wrote: post #15

These 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…

Some of the fake reviews are much better. Here's one for "Seattle Metro Heating and Cooling Services," which doesn't exist. One of this account's other fake reviews includes a photo ( https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/113396308112481697373/re... ): > We had a weird circumstance where we were out of town for an extended time and our HVAC unit quit working during a massive heat spell. Access to the house had to be co…

Its a lead farm the review may be real but still worthless. The named business does not exist but there is some sort of lead company that has local contracts and randomly assigns the job to some random guy that says he is HVAC cerified.

Nearly all locksmith, towing and moving company listings are like this now.

Its basically automating fly by night contractors. The paying customers will find the guarantees and warrantee are worthless.

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#134

Post by anamexis »

hollerith wrote: post #84
lubujackson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of the same path Google attempted with SEO spam, making the easiest path to success actually producing content people spend time on and link to. Of course, this has devolved into the "life story before the recipe" sites that have become the shining failure of what can go wrong by focusing on these metrics.

The incentive to put the story on the page along with the recipe comes not from Google, but rather from US copyright law, which has decided that a plain recipe is not copyrightable; there has to be some "personal expression".

This doesn't make sense to me. Isn't the recipe itself still not subject to copyright law? What is the benefit to the creator to adding the personal expression portion?

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#135

Post by splonk »

splonk wrote: post #85
jaycroft wrote: post #14

Earlier 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 used to work in this field (verifying local business listings). Locksmiths are traditionally the spammiest and scammiest industry of them all (along with taxis, before rideshare cut down their ROI). Basically any service area business has huge incentive to spam any and all business listing providers, and for whatever reason the locksmith industry became the worst of them. Flower delivery and personal injury lawyers…

(Too late to edit original post)

Just to illustrate how long locksmiths have been a problem, here's an article from 2009 talking about locksmith spam on maps. The techniques have changed but the general reliance on sketchy tactics hasn't.

https://searchengineland.com/despite-fixes-google-maps-still...

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#136

Post by asdadsdad »

klabb3 wrote: post #76

Taking a step back, we rely on countless systems every day where some reasonable proof-of-personhood is critical for the application, yet our countermeasures are best-effort in-house fraud prevention relying on security-by-obscurity. I suspect virtually all systems of today are ripe for exploitation in a rapidly evolving cat-and-mouse game. We’re in the early stages of a dirt cheap, sophisticated AI content generatio…

You're right. It is an issue and a lot of players and researchers are already into it in an area called "Trust & Safety". However, these are problems that pertain to platforms as opposed to other tech enterprises, and as such, they are mostly dominated by these companies interests and strategies. E.g. it can be argued that misleading advertisement is still good business for GoogleAds or Meta. Refer to a discussion here on HN along the lines of "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" to get a better idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about. Moreover, aside from being problems of the closed platforms we chose to be the "winners" of the Internet most people use, it looks like the companies don't want any help in solving them, or won't make it any easier. A lot of people has done research on fake instagram accounts, for instance. It now got almost impossible to have API access to followers/following ratio or even scrape it, which is a key metric in that research. Anyway, I digress, but yes, it's an issue, it's a proper issue of platforms that take human input, and it's one they don't want our help.

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#137

Post by therealdrag0 »

bandyaboot wrote: post #108

I’ve run into this when looking for an hvac contractor to do some work in my basement. Was just going through the listings and making a bunch of calls. It was definitely annoying encountering all the fake “store fronts”, but I also found that just by talking to them and asking a couple questions, it was super obvious which ones were fake and which ones were legit.

As a noob homeowner. What questions did you ask?

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#138

Post by therook12 »

I own a real locksmith business in Albany, NY. The legit companies here are getting killed with bot farm reviews. I get multiple daily. They are going to town. I believe it is a scammer company here paying for it. Said scammer company also turns out to be the Google Guaranteed company lol. Can’t make this stuff up. Like a dozen fake negative reviews a week. Its taken me years to build a good reputation and now its being completely destroyed with fake reviews that go so low as to insult my manhood.

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#139

Post by hollerith »

anamexis wrote: post #134
hollerith wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentive to put the story on the page along with the recipe comes not from Google, but rather from US copyright law, which has decided that a plain recipe is not copyrightable; there has to be some "personal expression".

This doesn't make sense to me. Isn't the recipe itself still not subject to copyright law? What is the benefit to the creator to adding the personal expression portion?

No: that's the point: copyright law says that a plain recipe is not copyrightable -- i.e., if I copy your recipe, you cannot sue me for copyright infringement unless the recipe is mixed in with your opinions and subjective perceptions and such.

Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

#140

Post by hollerith »

0cVlTeIATBs wrote: post #121
hollerith wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentive to put the story on the page along with the recipe comes not from Google, but rather from US copyright law, which has decided that a plain recipe is not copyrightable; there has to be some "personal expression".

Is prepending useless text an attempt to stop copying of the recipe, or is there another incentive (besides SEO)?

It is an attempt to stop copying of the recipe by allowing the site owner to sue the copiers for copyright infringement, which is not possible -- at least in the US -- for plain recipes.
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