Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

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So Nelson Mattos (http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/per...) confirms that what Mocality diagnosed is correct:

- there are people inside of Google, working for Google, that manually accessed web data of Mocality and then phoned Mocality clients making fraudulent claims about Mocality and practically trying to extort the money from the clients. Note that those in Google can't be "just some local Kenyans" as Mocality recored systematic access from Google India after access from Kenya stopped:

http://blog.mocality.co.ke/files/2012/01/both.png

Note also what Mocality logged:

- "8 different user agents mostly running Chrome on Linux"

It's so cries "Google" and it can be much more than eight people doing this, as, for example, all machines where hard disks are duplicated or are simply similarly configured would have the same user agent.

Mocality also estimates that

- "this team were calling 20-25 Mocality business per hour" (http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...)

This is SOO BIG.

Is it? At the most some team inside went rampant and will probably be fired. Aren't there bound to be some black sheep in any organization with 1000s of members?

The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous.

Have you noticed that at first Kenyans were the ones that called Kenyan clients, but from one point on the people from India took over?

Mocality recorded the calls, the MP3 files are linked in their original post:

http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...

Douglas, Kenyan, so local:

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/mocality-wordpress/audio/...

Deepthi, Indian:

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/mocality-wordpress/audio/...

It obviously can't be just "some team" when it spans minimum two continents, some small bad guys in Kenyan team are certainly not able to move the "local" operation to India.

The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous.

For real, right? Next thing they'll tell us is that Google would assist companies in displaying illegal drug ads in the US for profit. This is Google we're talking about. Have people already forgotten their motto is "Don't be evil"? You can't have that motto and do evil stuff -- it wouldn't be consistent.

You seem to have good and evil confused. Speaking as someone who's just ordered a number of meds online, helping me find the meds I need is "good". Trying to hinder this activity and censor it for stupid damn reasons is "bad".

I don't know about that story, in any case putting illegal ads on your public web site seems a weird way to make money. Wouldn't it be rather easy to find you and sue you? I am sure the police knows where Google Headquarters are??

I think the parent is referring to this: Google pays $.5B to settle w/ DOJ over illegal drug ads [1]

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/google_settlement...

"The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous."

If the Google people involved were tasked with developing Google's business in Africa, it's not ridiculous at all.

>"The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous."

Google's management has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to maximize profits. Running an eight person call center with wages competitive for the local market in Kenya is pretty cheap - but apparently not cheap enough, thus the operation was moved to India.

This wasn't rouge warriors led by one bad supervisor - the level of authority was sufficient to move operational production from the local manager to another continent. People up the food chain looked at what was happening and decided to scale it.

How much authority does a junior manager need to outsource telesales to India? And how many people have oversight over the suggested telephone scripts?

Possibly Googler's could shed some light on internal processes for things like that but my guess would be (i)not much if a business case for "engaging with Kenyan businesses" has already been agreed on by regional managers and (ii) one or two

I wouldn't expect the people that had oversight over the telephone scripts to still have a job by the end of next week, mind you.

> Google's management has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to maximize profits.

You need to stop using that word, you don't know what it means. "Fiduciary" has nothing to do with "maximizing profits", corporate executives and directors have no such responsibility. You are perpetuating a dangerous, damaging, and extremely ignorant myth pushed by robber-barons as an excuse for their immoral and unethical behavior.

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