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Comment by alexmuller | Hacker News Reader

I left this comment on the original post, but it's been caught by the spam filter there:

Hi Stefan – apologies if I’ve missed something, but the only solid proof I can see that this is actually run by Google is that the IP address some calls came from was assigned to Google.

Last year Mark Turner was concerned that the Department of Defense was listening in on his phone calls because of an IP address that later turned out to not belong to them at all, but (I believe) was being squatted on by Sprint. Couldn’t the same thing be happening here? http://www.markturner.net/2011/11/08/why-is-the-defense-depa...

I wonder whether the scammers aren’t actually employed by Google and are simply out to make a quick buck by pretending they are.

Can anyone speak to the technical aspects of his analysis? I'm not seeing any truly compelling proof that this is run by Google. Just the one IP address that's registered to Mountain View.

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That Sprint problem was caused by Sprint "borrowing" DoD addresses to use in their internal NATed mobile network. This wouldn't be an issue with a standard web site like Mocality which is directly connected to the Internet, instead of via NAT.

I trust Mocality's technical chops enough to believe that the IP traffic is coming from where they say it's coming from.

As additional proof, the callers claim to be from Google, and Getting Kenyan Businesses Online is a genuine Google initiative. So a lot of things wouldn't add up if it turned out not to be Google behind it.

I trust Mocality's technical chops enough to believe that the IP traffic is coming from where they say it's coming from.

I agree with this.

the callers claim to be from Google, and Getting Kenyan Businesses Online is a genuine Google initiative

Claiming to be a member of something legitimate on a phonecall is scamming 101 - it's usually very hard for the person on the other end of the line to verify it immediately.

So a team of rogue callers (some of them with indian google ips) pretending to be google pretending to be partners of mocality call numerous kenyan business numbers and promote google initiative. What's the point and who pays for that nonsense?

I'm not arguing with that at all - I think there is a very good chance someone at Google Kenya is about to get very fired.

BUT I do want to point out that relying on what unverified people say on the phone is very bad practice, and leads to an enormous number of social engineering security problems.

Yes, if you're going to try to make money by scamming people, obviously you're going to try to seem as legitimate as possible. And they are not necessarily trying to "promote google initiative." According to the transcript, they have you come into their office and presumably sign up for their hosting after they developed the website. All they have to do is throw up a couple signs in their office that say google and no one is going to know the difference.

edit: i'm also not saying google is NOT behind it, im just saying wait to hear all the facts.

Thanks for clarifying - ok, so there was lots of traffic from a Kenyan IP resulting in phone calls from a "Google employee", followed by traffic from a Google IP resulting in the same.

Perhaps I'm trying too hard to find a way out for Google, but this doesn't add up for me. Things like the Google callers giving out gmail.com addresses rather than their google.com addresses (transcript page 8).

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