A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
google.com
google.com
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 undercutting you on price, etc, when you can CREATE YOUR OWN entity, get that ranked and then SELL the leads to that plumber. You're the one with 100% control and if the plumber isn't happy, there's a dozen others who'll gladly take those leads.
Advanced lead gen owners use software such as MultiLogin along with mobile proxy farms to have hundreds of separate Chrome "entities" saved, all using different proxies, their own cookies, etc. This along with an infinite amount of other tools for call tracking, CTR manipulation, etc.
Mobile proxies have really changed the game, giving these lead gen folks an advantage. Because of the nature of mobile proxies (where multiple people can "share an IP address"), it's more difficult to detect. Since EACH GBP entity can bring in thousands/month, it's miniscule in terms of cost.
Reviews? Laughably easy to purchase and outsource, starting around $5/review. Combine this with fake Dalle images to attach to the review and/or GBP itself, and things can only get worse from here.
Google has actually begun VIDEO verification where you literally have to facetime with a Google employee to verify you own the business you say you own... even this can be gamed since any type of manual verification will be outsourced.
Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible.
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 suspended I had to make a video showing the above as well as including the cross streets in the video.
It doesn't surprise me so many people are gaming this system because it's effectively a free pass to the top of local Google searches as well as getting into Maps searches.
- 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.
One unique method is working exclusively with a local plumber, electrician, etc and HAVING THEM get you the addresses while you retain control of the GBP entity and sell them the leads.
The pitch goes like "you've seen the success I've had getting other clients tons of leads right? Get me 3-4 addresses in the cities you want to target and I can get them ranked" The client then asks around, uses their own address, etc to find them for you.
Related: I submitted edits for some of the businesses (marking them "Doesn't exist") and Google rejected the edits. My Maps contribution history says "NOT APPLIED - Google couldn't verify your edit" for a long list of fake businesses. If that's how they process reports - about new businesses with obviously anomalous reviews - it's no wonder this continues.
Using volunteer reports for anti-spam doesn't work because the spammers play a numbers game, and perhaps only 10% will be reported by a good citizen like you.
(Google Maps PMs, if you're reading this: feel free to contact me to hear my experience. There are some seemingly simple, low-false-positive ways to improve reporting of fake businesses and accounts.)
That being said, it's very fragile. The above friend was very well reviewed (300+ >4.5 stars) and popular in his market. He told me recently Google suspended him and it destroyed his business for a bit. Not sure if he's back up but he seems to be doing better now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully
I had this happen to me with the garage door case, dude showed up, different name on card than the van, and different than who I even called. Searching google maps for “garage door repair” turned up tons of businesses with fake sounding names, all a ton of fake 5 star reviews.
However, they still let lead aggregators get verified, provided they have a local business license. However, "legacy" google ads accounts like locksmithdirectory.com seem to be able to advertise anywhere in the nation.[1]
[0]https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7167635?hl=en
I will keep that yelp idea in mind next time
As to why Yelp is better than Google on this, I'd guess it's either that you got lucky, or that Google is more targeted than Yelp these days. I'm not up on the current state of how listing verification works now, but it's possible that Google's process is easier to target than Yelp's, and if there are any weaknesses, a locksmith marketer will figure it out pretty quickly.
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...
The plumber I hired this way did a good job at a fair price. For less urgent work I hired this company for other work even after getting bids from others.
I got quotes from three of their recommendations and ended up using the one a buddy found on the back of a church bulletin. Guy was amazing - a one man shop - super professional, fair price, quality work and replacement parts. Done in less than 1 hour. It's great to have a trustworthy plumber.
The Associated Locksmiths of America (ALoA) [0] has its own search tool [1]. Of course, the same rules apply as everywhere. Not all good locksmiths are members, and not all members are good locksmiths. But, personally, I'll take the word of a trade organization over that of an advertiser any day. The real tragedy here is that both google and yelp apparently missed the opportunity to serve up a tool like this, in favor of (I'm guessing here) whoever bought the most expensive SEO package.
To answer your question: In my experience, yelp is dealing with this by being a smaller service, in every sense.
Google has, by making itself the de faco choice for each and every mode of search, become a "bucket of crabs" [2][3]. As such, it as an environment is selecting for that crab who can best pull down the other crabs, and not the "tastiest" or whatever.
That said, I can't think of anyone, off the top of my head, who puts any money into yelp. Where I live, it simply isn't popular. It's not a part of the culture, the same way that google is, and so is not as attractive to interlopers, "puppy mill"-style franchises, etc. I believe you're getting better results simply because it's too small a bucket for bad-ish actors to see it as a viable feeding target.
Back to the trades: Imho, screw search engines at large - even ALoA's. Ask your friends for recommendations. Don't have any friends? Call up your favorite cafe, and ask them who they use. Even if their tradesmen work strictly in the commercial space, and you're looking for someone to do some residential work, they /really should/ be willing to recommend another tradesman. One doesn't work in the trades for very long, without being exposed to the other players in one's area.
Lastly, I beg you: if you've found a tradesman who treated you well at a fair price - evangelize on their behalf. Tell your friends and family. Ask that locksmith for a dozen business cards. Most of us will knock a few bucks off of a service call if we were recommended by word-of-mouth. Not everything needs to be an on-line affair.
[0] - https://www.aloa.org/index.html
[1] - https://www.findalocksmith.com/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
[3] - The only entity that wins, in this scenario, is the cat who owns the bucket... I know a number of very good tradesmen who feel like they need to spend very big money on SEO and advertising just to come out one index-position ahead of their competition. If the numbers -one and -two position, on google specifically in my area, would put aside what I call their "advertising cold war," they could both afford to take a very nice holiday every year. Sadly, they choose to subsidize some advertiser's very nice holiday. So goes the world.
edit: formatting...
Google Business Profile. its common courtesy to use the full name with the first use, THEN abbreviate.
What's the mechanism they use to convince Google to remove them?
The “fix” was to essentially reestablish the lost ownership of the business (which had paid Google Workspace and GCP presence) with their listing. Once they regained control, they were able to file a complaint and a Google reviewer removed the content.
It wasn’t a situation of “This place sucks” getting taken down.
Now, this part is funny. It's come full circle to a legitimate business. (Kind of)
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.
It’s less shady and more a simple reinvention of the marketplace model.
The shady bit is the fake reviews and also an element of “fake it til you make it”
So they’ve also reinvented the trad VC-backed business model!
Back in the late '00s I did development for a SEO-focused agency. We got a small firm that did a specific type of rental equipment. This was an industry that was traditionally very local and Yellow Pages oriented, to the point where leading brands were usually names like "A-Amazing AAA Aardvark Services".
The page was good enough that it started ranking on out-of-region searches.
So we built them a huge "directory" site. It had pages of spun content for almost every named city in the country, and we peppered it with a few listings of local service providers.
It was on the edge of being an actual useful resource; they went to their industry trade show and could say "We're page 1 (and frequently result 1) for that service name in almost every city in the country." It had your usual late-2000s/early-2010s good-practice SEO stuff-- well-formed URLs, tidy redirects everywhere, a few paragraphs of text on every page. They started taking a listing fee, allowing coverage at a per-county level.
It worked very well; getting real listings improved the actual user value of the rubbish content site and added further randomness to the generated content.
But anyway, they got greedy. They still had people calling their central phone number and wanting them to do reservations for them, which let them take a much higher commission than a listing fee paid. We built them some tooling to manage that sort of reservations. This is essentially the business model the fake GBP you mention is, except that for one narrow segment of the country, they were the service provider. More importantly, they replaced all the individual vendor contact info with their own.
They really wanted to hand over things to one of the owners' sons, who (along with the owner) had some very colourful pasts and questionable decision making abilities. So we let them go their own way, and continued to experiment with the model in other industries. Got good results in one other vertical, and a handful that just rotted on the vine.
But when we turn away, the site starts tanking in rankings. Maybe SEO spam detection improved, maybe removing the phone numbers made it obvious there wasn't much real content there. They ended up making various frantic changes trying to salvage the flow, but it was never the same. When I left the agency in the late 2010s, they were making frantic rework efforts trying to recapture the lost magic.
So I'd say the business concept can work, but it's weird how we have it being a SEO guy first. You'd think you'd find the service companies driving things-- by forming some sort of marketing/branding co-op with similar firms in different markets, they could split the costs of maintaining the SEO presence, and hiring a captive developer means they would be able to organize a flat rate dev contract rather than paying a high per-lead commission.
this makes me think that they felt like some other aspect of that GBP was why they deleted it. But since they won't tell us why, we have no idea. I could guess, but any guess is just that, a guess.
> Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible.
So... the real masters of the business model are the ones... actually operating the businesses they claim to be operating?
At that point... Are they even fake anymore?
I feel that this is going to be a big negative externality of AI: since it makes faking everything much easier, all verification processes will become more difficult and expensive. Eventually there will start being "you must come to this office and present ID" steps, with all the associated costs.
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.
https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1618705267801325568?s=6...
The same commenters - some of which Google Maps describes as "Local Guides" - also have commented on dozens or hundreds of businesses that don't exist at all.
The fake business entries are basically using Google Maps place locations for SEO and presumably, referral lead gen. Create dozens of business places with random addresses throughout a metro area, name them after a service that someone might enter ("Heating repair"), and list a Web site or phone number. Wait for less-savvy consumers search or stumble across them and call.
Among the dozens or hundreds of fake Google Maps businesses that this network has touched, here's two:
"Top Grade Rolling Firm": https://www.google.com/maps/place/Top+Grade+Rolling+Firm/@38...
Some of the fake reviews for nonexistent businesses even include photos:
"Santiago Appliance Repair Service": https://www.google.com/maps/place/Santiago+Appliance+Repair+...
That address is actually a random suburban house, not an appliance store.
Some of the fake businesses have gone undetected for years, and in that time, have collected a few real reviews from people who called and didn't receive the service. Here's one from "Heating Cooling Repair Services": https://www.google.com/maps/place/Heating+%26+Cooling+Repair... :
> If i could give them zero stars i would, don't waste your time.. I scheduled an appointment to fix my broken AC unit and was pleasantly surprised at getting an appointment the same week. I took off early from work to ensure I was home before the scheduled time. Nobody ever showed up, nobody called, and I called their number multiple times to see if maybe something came up and they never answered their phone.
Here's a Web site for one of these networks of fake businesses: https://nationalacservices.com/ . In that case, each fake Google Maps business links to a subdomain, like: https://lake-forest-park.nationalacservices.com/ .
Another: https://santiagoappliancerepairservice.us/
The fake Google Maps reviews are as generic as you'd expect. For example:
> I have been a patient at this medical laboratory for several years and have always had a great experience. The staff is friendly and efficient, and the facility is clean and well-maintained. I appreciate the quick turnaround time for test results and the ability to easily access them online. Overall, I have always received top-notch care at this facility.
The comments come from hundreds of Google accounts like these: https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/102638895982367652158/re... https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/111709777137583909632/re...
Google Maps doesn't have a way to report an entire account as a bot; one can only flag a specific comment. There's also no way to provide enough information for Google Maps' trust & safety team to understand what's happening and figure out how they're evading Google's bot detection. So, it continues unabated.
1) It looks like most of the reviewers have only reviewed a few businesses. Maybe this is to avoid suspicion, but if the accounts are fake they seem underutilized. I didn't see any fakes with over 6.
2) On the page you linked, several of the reviewers (Thaddues Kelly Parks, Darren Meyer, and Adilson Vierra) gave a standard glowing review but only awarded 3 stars. Also to avoid suspicion? Others gave 4.
3) All (almost all?) the fakes are within the last month. All of the extremely negative reviews are "a year ago". They are so negative I almost wonder if they might be fake too, and it might be extortion.
2. Yes, I imagine this is either to avoid suspicion or because the person writing/pasting this comment wasn’t paying attention and chose the wrong rating. Even fake reviews will have an error rate above 0 :-)
3. I was curious about that too. Another possibility is that the service really does suck, that’s reflected in the old negative comments, and eventually these businesses resorted to paying for reviews. All guesses though.
The alternative explanation is: they're real people who are terrible with technology and the internet. I've run a site where people could rate their experience with others, and the correlation between stars and text was only so-so. Lots of people considered 1 to be best, even though clicking on 1 showed a text "Terrible" just below it. 3 Stars was actually pretty common for glowing reviews.
Everybody keeps forgetting that lots of people write reviews, especially when you ask them to ("hey, if you liked it here, please recommend us on Google Maps"), and some of those people will be the kind who gets these Amazon questions from other customers and reply "I'm sorry, I don't know how well they fit, I bought these pants for my son but he blew up the chicken coop and hadn't had time to wear the pants yet".
a) scammers
b) people reviewing with zero/way too little context ("this is the BEST maternity ward in the universe!!!")
Likewise, I figure most 1 star reviews have some sort of axe to grind.
So I gravitate towards the 3 star reviews - that's where the interesting stories are.
But having it be the results of a bot farm makes sense too
The SCC bit has multiple uses - a transport division (minibuses for schools) and nowadays the vestiges of supported living. Its being wound down and is being sold off.
We moved to Yeovil Five Ways from near Hazlebury Plucknet (yes!) around 10 years ago. Google had no idea what was going on at this site when we moved in and I looked us up. Our bit was formally NHS - a clinic. The first thing I noticed was that their idea of the SCC "Resource Centre" was way off so I submitted a change - went through in seconds. When the eye of Sauron eventually noticed that my business had moved, it screwed up the entrance. I tried to change it. No dice.
I can make a change to a publicly owned property but not my own.
Google's insistence on hiding behind computers ("the Algorithm") needs to be challenged. It is way more important than my silly little snag. Google need to employ more people and not sack them! When an org. becomes the de facto authority on something then obviously they have developed a monopoly. Monopolies need to have responsibilities enforced on them.
Double checking the map later and looking at Street View, the storefront was conveniently obscured by a tree.
But didn't they used to? Some of their old support articles used to mention the ability to report accounts, but that functionality seems to have disappeared.
I tried to report a business garnering fake 5* reviews last week and was frustrated that there was seemingly nothing I could do, especially since they buy and sell stolen goods.
I had been leaving reviews for about a decade on a number of businesses I interacted with.
Some were pretty bad and I had extensive reviews with photos etc. The most egregious was a hotel in Lisbon where all the fire extinguishers were empty (with pictures).
One day I got an email from google maps that one of my reviews had been reported and flagged, and that they removed all my reviews ever and disabled my ability to post reviews.
To this day, I have no way to reverse the decision, or even find out which review was reported and flagged. I can’t leave new reviews anymore, can’t talk to anyone at google about it (of course), and all my reviews have indeed been taken down (verified by going to places I remember reviewing and not seeing my review anymore when not logged in)
On one hand I feel it’s google’s loss for their own idiocy and blind automation, but on the other I feel like it’s just letting the scammy businesses win: just report reviews you don’t like and they’ll get taken away making your scammy business have only 5 star reviews.
I’m wondering if it’s time to properly categorize these attacks as a separate and omnipresent danger to computer systems that process and distribute human input, and take it seriously. (Is there already a term for this? Sybil-attacks?) Are security researchers or academia largely overlooking an elephant in the room? Maybe I live under a rock, but I haven’t seen any interesting movement in analyzing, much less mitigating, these threats systematically.
Specifically, I fear the huge boost in human-imitation AI will shift the scales in favor of gray/black actors, due to reduced general trust-levels (as if they weren’t already low). If fake reviews cost $5 today, but $.01 tomorrow, there’s simply no way our dams will hold to that pressure. We really need some answers on how to navigate the upcoming sea of bullshit, or we’ll regress quickly into a world that’s disorienting at best, for good actors, and offers plenty exploitation by bad actors.
1. 10 Google Reviews, 50 – 100 Words, REAL Active Profiles, Local Profiles, Drip Feed Method, 24/7 Ticket Support, for $94.99
2. 20 Google Reviews, 50 – 100 Words, REAL Active Profiles, Local Profiles, Drip Feed Method, 24/7 Ticket Support, for $179.99
I always assumed that if you have bad reviews, the go-to was to either change how you operate, change your business name, or do both.
> We had a weird circumstance where we were out of town for an extended time and our HVAC unit quit working during a massive heat spell. Access to the house had to be coordinated and the bill had to be paid remotely. None of that was an issue for Roy, who was able to get out and repair the problem super quickly and for a completely reasonable amount. This is our first time using Seattle Metro Heating & Cooling Services. The experience was so positive that they will be our go-to HVAC professional from here on out.
Nearly all locksmith, towing and moving company listings are like this now.
Its basically automating fly by night contractors. The paying customers will find the guarantees and warrantee are worthless.
Doordash is into extremely sketchy territory. Here is a good link if you want to know more.also read the top rated comment from former grubhub executive.
"Need a real plumber? Well here's a good one for 5$. A competent lawyer? 50$ and I'll tell you."
The sad thing is that big corporations won't fix this problem unless they are allowed to fully compromise everyone's privacy. The can solve it in another way, but they won't. This is a people problem and requires people solutions (Governments).
I'm surprised by how unsophisticated the approach appears. Interesting to see the problem is not limited to duct cleaning businesses.
Anyway, aren't they doing address verification with snail mail nowadays?
Independent contractors are easy. Many are just listed under their names, and even if they use a business name, their business number is almost always just the cell phone. When you call they’ll either not answer and you have to leave a voicemail to get a call back, or if they do answer, they’ll pick up with something like “this is <insert name>”. So for them you don’t even need to ask anything.
When calling a number that is supposedly a small shop, I found that when I told them what I was wanting and asked “is that something you would do?”, the fake ones would immediately say yes. The legit places would ask follow up questions, or if it was an office worker, they would have one of their techs call me back.
Lake O'Hare https://maps.app.goo.gl/P66Y8QQfbu2aWjwMA
Edit: Just noticed you said prove that it's always the same person. They can not do that. But they can prove that it's a unique human. Which seems good enough for online reviews imo, where it doesn't exactly matter who the person is.
I had to drive about 40 minutes to a drive through location beyond the other side of town. They also billed my insurance over $500.
Assuming you got accurate results in a timely manner, you got the better deal by not having to leave your neighborhood.
https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/wu53h3/anons_discove...
Any public spirited hacker out there who wants to synthesize this material?
And even scientific papers often contradict each other, they are also good quality but far from delivering truth. At least in some fields, papers are just throwing random ideas to the wall seeing what sticks. We don't even have proper theories to guide this process.