Google search for a local restaurant returns scammer’s ad as top result
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A beat up van showed up, without any EMT, a sketchy stretcher without straps, and no tracks or fasteners to hold it down inside the van. We were outraged and asked them to leave immediately. They demanded money to leave, and left only when we threatened to call the police on them.
We realized our mistake and scrolled down to the actual results and called the reputed local hospital which sent a properly equipped legit ambulance. Thankfully it was a simple fracture and the lost time did not lead to dangerous complications. But this could have been fatal if the emergency was more serious.
When I returned to the US, I tried searching for ambulances, and Google conspicuously avoids showing ads and suggests calling 9-1-1.
Their main business is ads, not search.
Actually, if I google "phone number ambulance" in America, I get a bunch of random ambulance companies and not 911.
If I just google "ambulance" I get stuff about the recent movie.
In the US, if you dial 9-1-1 for a medical emergency, in most regions, it is highly likely that an ambulance with EMT/paramedics will arrive in < 10 min.
In my city of Bengaluru, there are, no exaggeration, good hospitals within 2-5 km of any point in the city. Most of these hospitals have ambulance fleets that can get to you fast, within 10-15 minutes. Anecdotally, people prefer calling these hospitals directly for ambulance.
Caveat: I am not recommending hospital ambulances over 112, but just saying that I am not aware of 1-1-2 response time and effectiveness.
> In my city of Bengaluru, there are, no exaggeration, good hospitals within 2-5 km of any point in the city. Most of these hospitals have ambulance fleets that can get to you fast, within 10-15 minutes. Anecdotally, people prefer calling these hospitals directly for ambulance.
Oh yeah certainly, it’s similar here in Mumbai. Having said that fortunately we’ve never had to call one in an emergency.
This is so the cell network can prioritise emergency calls and also will allow them to be made even when other calls are blocked (e.g. if you have no credit, or you only have signal on another network, or even if your phone is blocked by IMEI because it was reported stolen).
Landlines are different, they do treat emergency calls as a call to the emergency number and whether they will reroute another country's emergency number to the one where you are will depend on the specific exchange you are connected to (e.g. in the UK, 999 will work on all landlines; 112 on almost all except the oldest analogue exchanges and 911 on most but missing some older exchanges).
Inspired by YouTube's DMCA claim system (or my superficial understanding of it). If there's a "bug bounty" on fraud, there will be an enthusiastic market for identifying it. If ad fraud doesn't reliably pay, the fraud market will be disincentivized. Finally, Google itself will have incentives less mis-aligned with its users'; its current incentive system being "the fraudsters pay us more; therefore we love fraud!"
Two years ago, I got fluffed up about scammers claiming unclaimed businesses. Like the food delivery startups (like Doctorow mentions).
I started talking to my reps (city council, state) but haven't gotten any further. And I don't know where to start drafting the legislation.
With some sort of resolution or model legislation, I can shop it around, get the ball rolling. Like chamber of commerce, some scammed businesses, my representatives.
Thanks.
Not to mention a cottage industry of creating then "solving" the ad fraud. I imagine Google's solution for this would be 100% Yelp.
Sounds like we need scammy middleware between regular people and the complaint system to keep complaints flowing, monetize later!
Amazon has a system like this, where you can "claim" listings. It's how scam products get all those five star reviews for some other profuct. They find a t-shirt or some little thing doing well and file claim after claim until they win the listing.
Two of my favorite H. L. Mencken quotes:
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
And this one:
"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be."
-Lyndon B. Johnson
I wish there were a requirement to list all the foreseeable consequences of any law that's proposed, both positive consequences and negative ones.
If this was feasible why wouldn't you do this for every decision in life.
Public policy affects millions of lives. I don't think enumerating 1st order or 2nd order effects is too onerous. And if it is, that's why government officials have assistants and interns.
Please enumerate all the positive and negative consequences of your requirement!
Unless you have a magic wand, simplicity usually masks conflicting incentives backed by lots of political, financial, and legal capital. It's like looking at a war and saying 'why don't people just stop fighting, because peace would be nicer.'
The social default is to look at problems as examples of individual deviance from a principled ideal. It's more instructive to look at them as examples of resource mobilization in contested/conflicted spaces. The italicized words are terms of art in social science that represent two prominent schools of thought (which are themselves in competition).
Broadly speaking, when someone infringes trademark, they are entitled to the damages done, which are likely much greater than the ad revenue here.
But I understand Google here. It's probably their single biggest income stream. Our company is using a very big chunk of our ad words budget targeting our own brand name to make sure it's on top. More than for any other keyword by far. And I imagine many others do the same.
Google are enabling fraud on a massive scale by permitting the hijacking of established names and brands. Often brands or names that some small family company has worked for years to build a reputation for.
We do indeed live in a world where tech and capitalism have birthed some sort of horrific offspring that’s choking us all.
Google are not only making it worse because of advertising, they're making it worse by facilitating scammers and fraudsters and various other criminals.
All because their systems are so automated as to eschew any review that might actually make advertising on the Internet slightly less distasteful (and maybe the FBI wouldn't be recommending the choking off of Google's primary income stream)
Stealing and impersonation good, sex bad.
People in the US have this puritanical view on sex -> it is inherited by Silicon Valley -> it gets forced onto the rest of us.
Since the rest of us are forced to rely on US-based products in some capacity (app stores, payment processors, CDNs...), you can't make anything sex-related even in places where sex work is viewed far more openly than in the US.
The US doesn't have a smalltime corruption problem, you don't bribe your local cop, it has a bigmoney corruption problem as seen (again) here.
We are going to end up with 10 'scammer' ad in the top 10 result, each and everyone fighting each other with more ad budget and lower profit margins.
In the end, the website owner won't even need a website.
You shouldn't need to do this. Googles ad auction on search multiplies your bid by a quality score when deciding which ad to show. A site that satisfies what the user is looking for will have a high quality score, whereas the 'wrong' site (ie. one for a competitor) will have a low quality score - partly determined by the user clicking the back button when they find they have been misled.
That means that if your competitors are pumping $100 into becoming the top search result, you perhaps only need to put $1 into getting the same ad spot.
If you are finding that not to be true, then it might be because your site is low quality for some reason (for example, maybe it doesn't load for some users in some browsers), or maybe your site doesn't have the info people are looking for when they search your company name.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...
For a while I'd bid on the names of competitors (Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement); however, I found I was spending a bunch with basically zero conversions because - I assume, if someone is searching for something, they're expecting that something, so when they click it and realize it's not - they just exit.
On the other hand, bidding my own name: pennies.
From the end user's point of view, how is "win the #1 result placement" for a competitor's name not a blatant scam?
It's the difference between bidding on the keyword BrandX when my company is ABCBrand with an ad that says:
"Come shop at BrandX" .. when it's going to my ABCBrand, and possibly even having a landing page pretending to be BrandX
vs.
"Come shop at ABCBrand" ... and going to my ABCBrand, as it should.
I can plug OEM 1 + Model1 and get two to three ads for OEM2/3/4 before I get the result I was looking for.
There should be a solution to the problem of the scammers. Banning advertising being allowed to show up on someone else's organic search results ain't it.
It gives newer, or less well-known, companies a chance to gain exposure. And consumers like me might learn about a superior option they didn’t know previously.
Edit: Thought experiment. Over in the Figma thread there’s a lot of talk about trying to ween themselves and others off Adobe products. So is it really a negative for the industry and consumers if Figma shows ads on searches for Photoshop?
Fair enough, but a lot of them are trying to confuse the customer, as Cory Doctorow found
If the ad at all appears to originate from the company that is the target of the ad keyword it should be rejected or require verification that it’s from the company.
Google could even charge a $10 “review fee” for ads placed directly on competitors keywords (per ad treatment, not per ad treatment per keyword) to discourage this behavior from scammers
Yes, because Google's intended and actual outcome is companies are blackmailed into paying to compete on advertising for their own names. Which is highly likely a navigation query.
It would be different if someone googled "photoshop alternatives" or sth
Like "Figma: an Alternative to Photoshop" (you can tell I'm not an advertising copywriter).
https://www.vice.com/en/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-to...
I can even agree with Trip Advisors' reasoning that their main concern are not fake restaurants, but dodgy reviews.
Nevertheless, this never should have been allowed to slip through the cracks.
It wasn't just a make pretend great London eatery on Trip Advisors.
It was fucking number 1 in a city with literally 10s of thousands rated restaurants.
So if you're looking at averages, there's no way that real can compete with fake.
The company has no website, just a toll-free number. The business name doesn't match anything in the state records. If you zoom in, the address given is literally in some kind of alley. The business has 4.5 stars and all of the reviews are in vague, broken English that never contain any details about the service or why they needed it.
My guess is that when you call them, they take your info and then call a real locksmith in the area and pocket the difference.
TL;DW: this is widespread in most cities in Canada. Scammers just setup fake businesses on google to have your nearest locksmith be some generic chain.
I would expect this to be the same for the US.
Seems like straight up fraud to me.
Doctorow calls them out in the thread: AmEx and Google in particular.
Isn't there a small thing called "regulators" for this? Or is US government now so fundamentally broken that it can't even provide its basic function anymore and has to be replaced by "pretty-please" appeals to megacorporations?
The latter, partly.
But a bigger problem is that actually-functional government is no longer part of the worldview of most of the public. Ditto for serious consequences for the responsible elected officials, when government fails at its basic functions.
Without those things, it is really not possible to sustain a high-functioning government.
The state enforcing laws using the threat of violence (the only enforcement mechanism they have) is a last resort, not a first. Institutions having the desire to not create a broken world should be the first line of defense.
Google doesn't give a fuck anymore, and are fine watching the world burn now. I personally speculate that most Googlers today are simply there for the paycheck, and their apathy about the way their products work reflects that.
Now what?
Huh? Why's this? It seems like a core component of a functional state to me, and if the state is doing a decent job, why should a bunch of private parties be sticking their noses in too?
Same with Catholics and confession-- another broken system in which you are free to sin arbitrarily through confession and repentance. The point of the doctrine itself is to transcend the cycle and be better than that. (I know little about it but I'm told there is a similar mechanism in Hinduism re: karma.)
Fear of god/state/consequence keeps people in line, but it's a failsafe, not the governor. The only thing preventing fraud in your tribe should not be the intangible threat of later consequence from a greater authority. You're supposed to respect each other enough to not prey on your own kind.
Another take is looking at crimes like CSA. The state punishes it when it is brought to their attention, but that does not absolve the community from necessarily participating in its policing ahead of that-- the community are the ones best positioned to detect, intervene, and enforce social norms around it in the first place.
This moral argument may be applicable to individual people, but this is yet another example that companies under the current system (and, by extension, their governing bodies) only have one goal: maximizing profits.
In the abscence of fear of punishment by a more powerful actor, if the common good gets in the way of profits, the latter will always prevail.
More importantly, it makes them irreplaceable since competing products from smaller companies simply cannot afford policing at such level while the bad actors are running around unpunished.
So long as the people believe that their only choice is "which king will rule over us?", their society will remain a monarchy.
If you try to sell property on your own, you'll get many unsolicited offers from real estate agents, sometimes claiming they already have a buyer and sometimes this is even true.
AGs and DAs don't care about small-scale scams and ripoffs and cheats, generally aren't equipped to investigate them, and if the party committing fraud is in another country are likely to throw up their hands and say "not in my jurisdiction."
This will stop with tough legislation and penalties that force Google to give up a percentage of its annual revenue. It will never happen in the United States.
It is easy to assign blame to victims.
This has happened to bycicle owners. If you don't lock your bike it's your fault your bike gets stolen. But theft is illegal. Theft is if someone wants to take something that doesn't belong to him and then executes the taking. Locks don't change this fact. It just makes the execution of the crime more difficult.
I have a vision of an utopia where people can leave all things unlocked. If they get stolen, the thief gets identified immediately and he has to give the things back. No punishment at all or only a token punishment. This should work because sanctions are not neccessary if no harm was done. Today we punish caught thieves somewhat harshly because we need to deter people from becoming thieves. If we can stop thefts just after the fact, token punishment will suffice. If someone repeatedly tries to steal things in that utopia we could offer therapy or try to find out the underlying cause of the attempted thefts. That's utopia: everything works out perfectly for everybody (shrugs).
Today we lock our browsing experience using uBlock just because we have to. We also have to lock our bikes, because we have to. Sorry for the tangent.
That's utopia for you (shrugs).
What?
It's difficult to tell online whether a statement is facetious or not. But I can't see how this makes any sense otherwise.
One advantage of visions of utopias: they give ideas for a better world and also it shows what-if perspectives: what if we really could catch thieves in a beneficial way and help them? what if there is a business opportunity because there's a need to be fulfilled?
I mean, if this is a "great Thai restaurant in my neighborhood", how likely is it he ordered there yesterday for the first time?
You're probably joking, but even if you do order from a place a couple times a year it can be hard to tell which site is theirs. A local restaurant for me at one point had two different websites, each featured different indoor pictures of the location and their food. I never knew if I should use the new one or the old one, with the problem being solved when they retired and the new owners renamed the place.
When Google stopped putting a meaningful distinction between paid results and organic results that was a line for me. It's fine to have an adverts - you have to pay the bills but when the adverts become the results it's just pay to play rentseeking by Google and the product is now untrustworthy and on a downward spiral as a result. Amazon search results have taken a similar route, you can search for something specific and get something totally unsuitable as top result now.
----------
Alice:
“Is Cory talking about these predatory fake restaurants? Or Google itself?”
Beth:
“Yes?”
the only counter-point I have is when I used to sell demonstration boards: they cost me almost nothing to produce and I designed them in minutes, but people who bought them said I saved them R&D time in the long run (open source)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916239
Need more convincing ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34650366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34641328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34557354
Also a law to hoover up more personal information with zero repercussions…
Same as Apple/Google aren't guilty of creating malware apps then it slips through, but the predatory ass who coded the app and published it is. Same as Walmart isn't guilty of poisoning people when they stock a product that's spoiled in production, but merely failing to verify proper credentials set up by regulators.
I don't know why so many people here and elsewere refuse to hold people creating predatory/fradulent companies accountable , but instead demand that megacorporations control access to your products instead. Which they repeatedly fail and and exploit to enrich themselves at your expense.
Compare to food: it's like demanding that Walmart screen all the food itself to protect you and then you'd screech at Walmart and only Walmart for not making sure Keloggs cereal is healthy while letting the manufacturer off the hook with zero (I repeat, zero, none, null, NADA) consequences for fraud and damage they caused.
The way media, HNers and other people behave is creating a situation that's terrible to the extreme.
Now, do a thinking experiment: how did we ensure product quality in food/electronics/other parts that DID NOT hang on the fact that Walmart has 100% monopoly on all sales of those products and completely locks out you ability to go to any other store? How did we build a system that holds manufacturer of fradulent good accountable, not the megacorporation doing the distribution?
Likewise you can't just sell stolen goods even if you don't know they're stolen. They'll be confiscated at best and you'll be charged for fencing stolen goods at worst.
Remember that we punish the companies that build products against standards first, not just Walmart for stocking them. We also don't trust exclusively just Walmart to set and enforce food safety standards (because that would be problematic for competition wouldn't it)? We have independent standard bodies.
And right know we have NOTHING to beat Google (or Apple or anyone) on the head with because there's no standard or rule they've ignored when they allowed this ad to be published.
And so Walmart makes a solid effort to ensure they know who they are buying product from.
Spoiled advertisements/news programs/blog spam are not easy to identify by _todays_ customers, and thus do not incentivize quality controls. I think the solution to todays attention problem is to meet the problem on the same battlefield; attention! If anyone has a clever idea to marry people w/o situational awareness to a flywheel that creates situational awareness lmk.
People certainly can point the finger, for them to share some accountability, because Apple/Google are debatably suppressing competition. If people must use their store or search engine, then become victims of fraud, they are going to question how such got through their filtering systems and why can't they have other alternatives. It's one thing, if on an open system, the user chose a shady app on some odd corner of the web and it's another if the app is put in front of their face.
If they can't sanitise their primary means of profit then...
Nothing, because there's no regulation after how many years?
Why are actual criminals being unpunished while you wring your hands on how megacorporations aren't playing the police?
I also block ads like my life depends on it.
TLDR: Scammers cloned a restaurant website. Amex gave them a merchant account despite fake address and fake phone number. Google let them advertise the fake restaurant despite none of the data matching Google's knowledge box.
And I just love the quote, here in context:
"Doug @Rushkoff says that the ethic of today's "entrepreneur" is to #GoMeta - don't provide a product or a service, simply find a way to be a predatory squatter on a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who use those things."
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948931710451712
(which sadly mirrors my impression with all those #Entrepreneurs that like to tag #Hustle on everything they do, like those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34921099 )
We actually live in a pretty good timeline when we complain about ordering Thai food over the internet and the worst that happens is we get our food delivered with some trouble.
It is amazing that I can watch videos on youtube for free but it is not awesome that they freely present alcohol ads to alcoholics and it is near impossible to get rid of them unless you are savvy enough to block them and/or pay for youtube premium. It is not okay to have predatory get-rich-quick-schemes categorized in the ads for creators that they can opt out of. It is nice that creators have that option not to advertise something that is designed pray upon vulnerable people, but what the fuck.... if youtube categorize the ads then they should be able to say no to them wholesale and not benefit from that. There are videos get-rich-quick-schemes uploaded that you need to search for that is another ballgame, it is easier to report them and having them removed because they are not giving them money.
But, equally, do you enjoy your paradise when you’re dimly aware you might be living in The Matrix?
We could all not be here now, for instance. That would be the worst for me.
I wrote a comment about it before:
Google opens the floodgates to the spam-dam, but here's a bucket and a ladder you can use in case you want to put some of the water back.
For the same reason a Yelp result shows up as the second item on the page: Google's never (to my knowledge) had a policy against advertising on keywords associated with another firm. It is, in fact, a common way to get out in front of a company that is riding on brand-name recognition; advertising 101.
... but Google is having a recurring problem that users can't tell ads apart from organic results anymore, and if they don't do something they're at serious risk of losing reputation on search (which is in a precarious place right now). My recommendation would be to go back to yellow-boxing ads.
(ETA: If Mr. Doctorow is meaning the emphasis to be placed on "scam artists", as in "Why can't Google tell these are scammers"... I guarantee when Google goes to that page they don't see a scam site. Masking is an old tactic. It used to be the case that Google had good countermeasures against masking, but as of late it seems like something has gone amiss with their ability to detect scams reliably, or volume has saturated their capacity, or it was always this bad and we're just in a media cycle right now... Insufficient infromation for me to be able to tell).
I think cloning a website would probably fall under their misrepresentation policy. “We don’t allow ads or destinations that deceive users by excluding relevant product information or providing misleading information about products, services, or businesses.”
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to see ANY ads. I don't care if an ad doesn't track me, I don't want to see it because it can still be harmful.
If I look at my non nerdy friends over last 20 years: 1. None of them are even aware of ad blockers 2. They'll claim "ads don't bother them" / they don't need one 3. They predominantly use phones and it can be tricky to install a working ad blocker () and 4. Yes they'll fall victims to ad scams - I didn't say they weren't internally contradictory people :P
(): Yes it IS tricky to install ad blocker to a non-nerdy person. They need to learn what is it, why do you use one, how do you install one that's not a scam in itself!, how do you manage one, what are the limitations, how do I update it, which browser should I use, why doesn't my favourite porn-gambling-bingo-site work anymore, etc etc. I myself have ad blockers on my computer but have constantly failed to integrate a reliable ad blocker into my phone use cases.
I hope Google get enough money from these sites to make it worth it.
Must've seen a half dozen articles on fake ad sites for cloud vendors and various services in the last couple of weeks alone.
1 - And why the actual FUCK is @GoogleAds accepting these scam artists' ads for a business that they already have a knowledge box for?! Google KNOWS what the real KIIN restaurant is, and yet they are accepting payment to put a fake KIIN listing two slots ABOVE the real one.
I don't think this is about "reviewing all search results". This is about reviewing the people who are paying you money to run ads.
In this case, there were likely plenty of signals of fraud. This advertiser was advertising to multiple domains, and each domain was relatively young. Those domains would likely also have had low organic traffic.
Here are some candidate solutions. I haven't thought these through deeply. This is spur-of-the-moment thinking. A multibillion dollar company could hopefully do better than me.
1 - Google could review new paid domains. In this case, the fraudulent site posted contact information, including the phone number for the real business! Phoning that number would have revealed the fraud immediately.
2 - Google could generally validate the identity of its advertisers. Advertising for a business? Cool, let's see some incorporation or tax paperwork.
3 - Google could impose a cost for being fraudulent. Want to run ads? Cool, we'll take a $1,000 retainer for each top-level domain you want to advertise. When you close your account, you can have it back after a 90-day waiting period. If we bounce you for fraud, we'll keep it.
I used to work in ad tech. We reviewed the people we entered into financial relationships with, because we knew their bad behaviour could affect us. Google could do similarly.
To your suggestions... 1- who is going to phone that number? They have millions if not billions of advertisers. Also, don't they want new businesses (with likely newly registered domains) to come and start advertising and paying money?
2. see above but "who is going to review the paperwork" also, easy to create fraudulent documents
3. Most small restaurants probably spend $100 on ads, likely aren't going to advertise if they need to put down a bunch of cash.
To Google, this just looks like a restaurant coming to advertise. So what if it has the same name. Two Dominos pizzas in my town could both set up ads and they should accept them.
I totally get why this is bad, but I think it would be very difficult for Google to control in a way that the OP twitter user is suggesting. This isn't an old school ad business where you meet with clients. Google is a trillion dollar company because you can run ads in 1 minute of work.
I agree they wouldn't want to voluntarily do it--but I was responding to the perceived impossibility of it.
Another option: deal with it by franchising--small potatoes customers would go through a middleman. The middleman would charge a markup, and be the one whose reputation or money was on the line, and so have incentives to prevent fraud.
Google does something similar for AdX relationships currently--big publishers can go direct, midsize publishers go through a third party middleman.
Again, I'm just spitballing ideas here. If Google wanted to be a better steward, I believe they could be. I'm not even saying they're obligated to do this, I'm just saying I believe they could try harder to vet advertisers.
It would be like trying to trademark and lawyer up the phrase "Food Store" or the word "Burger" in the USA.
I noticed the website was weird and I found my way to the correct one.
So what would it look like?
You want to control the snippet in a way that’s impossible with organic search.
Among other hypothetical situations.
Instead, because Google chooses to charge for that first link, it creates a situation where the business owner knows they have to outbid the competition to get the link above their own.
This is great for Google’s shareholders, bad for the restaurant.
But maybe that's just me being shortsighted and valuing benevolence over revenue.
The poor human just wanted some food, they didn't realise they were going to have to navigate scams when searching Google for a local, unique business name.
Maybe the human is just a rube and they deserve all the trickery served up to them.
Google: You've registered ads for hundreds of unrelated businesses. We've suspended your account for fraudulent automated activity, please provide evidence that you own or are acting on behalf of these entities.
Ublock origin in firefox returned, in order. 1. openai.com, 2. openai.com blogpost, 3. ChatGPT Wikipedia, 4. ChatGPT story on digitaltrends.com, 5. ChatGPT article on ZDNet.com.
Clean firefox with no ublock, in order. 1. openai.com, 2. ChatGPT Wikipedia, 3. ChatGPT story on digitaltrends.com, 4. ChatGPT article on ZDNet.com, 5. ChatGPT article on businessinsider.com.
What am I missing?
How does this logic work for victims of other crimes and misdemeanours?
If a security expert has "password123" as their password for all services, everyone would be surprised unless he had been previously identified as a fool.
That someone tech-savvy doesn't use an adblocker is surprising to me, too.
It’s embarrassing, but I have managed to avoid being really ripped off. The worst one, was many years ago, when I responded to a “your domain name is available” email.
I got the domain, eventually, but I probably paid double its worth, and had to get into an e-shouting match with the scammers, who were trying to lease me the name, as opposed to sell it to me (they do this, so they can quadruple the cost, as soon as you set up some infrastructure on the name).
They gave it to me, in the end, because I made it clear that I was gonna be one hell of a PItA to keep as a “customer.”
Welcome to “being human.”
Of course he's savvy, that's how he's placed to explain it to less savvy people.
Of course he could just avoid it. You or I might (with a 98% success rate maybe), and then get on with our internet-savvy day job. But doing this is his internet-savvy day job. And good that it is someone's.
And that those of least means all live outside those walls.
Instead of using a static descriptor “Parasitic Middleman, LLC”, they send a dynamic descriptor for each transaction to tell the user “KIINTHAILA: OK, that was my Thai order; yeah, that was me”. It’s no different than when you see an order number on your statement or other dynamic text.
I don’t approve of the business practice (and take care to avoid it with my local takeout places), but I don’t think it’s an Amex failure here.
Typical error of his, going "A Bridge Too Far". He points out something interesting and important to lure you in and then hand-gestures grandly toward an industry/practice that he feels we should all question. Because, you know, brilliant genius Cory Doctorow.
https://support.google.com/business/thread/5820393/doordash-...
https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki...
Also, I'll give you that he does hand-gesture grandly in this Twitter thread, but he co-wrote a whole book about it called Chokepoint Capitalism. There's a lot more detail about it there, and the logic there applies here.
* https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki... * https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...
I could sell Armani, and buy from their site, I'd be an unofficial reseller.
The point in general (slight change of position here) is that had they not stated "official", reselling is perfectly fine. As you point out trademark infringing (representing yourself as them by saying official) is not.
The identity fraud is core to the product. Had they not registered a domain that made them sound official and said that they were the other company, nobody would get confused and think they're ordering from the actual company.
Armani will tear you up if you set up "armani-losangeles.com" and pretend that you're Armani, even if you don't mention "Official Website".
Poor example, I'm fairly sure that the designer brands are most likely to sue parallel importers and grey marketers.
Personally I'm going to continue to block ads on the advice of the FBI regardless what some other people say about it, I'm going to continue to refuse to use third party delivery services, and I'm going to continue to refuse to use any third party rating or aggregator service for local businesses. And also I'm going to continue aggressively avoiding Google products and services.
I've just recently migrated to a daily driver android phone without any Google services sitting in the background.
Stay strong, follow the path!
Well, evidently, it doesn't outrage you.
But my impression was the rage was more directed at Google and Amex, who were in a position to easily prevent the fraud but instead choose to benefit from it.
The one party who cannot do anything about it (except cancelling orders and calling their customers until the fraud stops) is the original restaurant.