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Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

I feel Google, Facebook, etc. all need to setup actual phone numbers and chat rooms, and make them rank highly on searches for "Google support phone number", "Google fraud department", "Google account recovery department", "Google Live Support Chat" etc.

Then those numbers should simply play a message that this is the only official phone number, and no human will ever call from or answer this number, and the company does not offer customer support or appeals to account problems.

They also need to make searching for fraud phone numbers return anti-fraud messaging rather than what it currently does. Seems like the entire 844-906 exchange is fraudulent [1].

I had a family member that just got scammed because they panicked after their Facebook account got banned, basically exactly like [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=844-906

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/01/31/51...

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“If you receive a calling from Google, ask them for your issue ID, hung up and call 1-1-GOO”

1-1-GOO: “Google never contacts customers directly and has no way to let customers contact them. Hace a nice day”

Or, hear me out: provide actual customer support.

To 4+ billion customers. Not possible at any realistic company size.

If you or any person figured out how to do such a thing you’d be the next trillion $ company.

That's a consequence of growth they should have thought of and a basic part of running any business.

At least in the US Attorneys General are being forced to do this work for them. It's essentially the only way to get a hacked Facebook/Instagram account recovered.

https://www.engadget.com/41-state-attorneys-general-tell-met...

No, attny generals chase things that raise their political stature. They’re political. Every single one of the 50 are dem or republican: 0 independent.

They’ll make noise about this because it riles a loud minority. If they really wanted it fixed then pass laws. They don’t, because they also like business.

Users in low wage countries with minimal profit per customer doesn’t preclude US / Canadian tech support where they get 20+x the revenue per user.

They are making 10+$/month per user for a few hundred million, and have a large profit margin that easily pays for basic tech support.

The corps want you to believe that but it's not true.

India requires direct customer support by law.

It’s math. They don’t need me to believe anything.

They provide support in India to meet local laws.

If your scaling requires you to ignore some laws and regulations, maybe your scaling is just a wet dream that should not become reality, and still attempting it should be punished. It's just the cost of doing business.

No laws or regulations were broken. If your desire to punish things which anger you means you ignore laws, maybe the problem isn’t the company.

Nonsense. It's (moderately) expensive, it's a cost. It's far from impossible, the proof of that being that huge companies did and do provide customer support.

Big tech loves "stripping unnecessary fluff" and "being efficient". Turns out the "unnecessary" stuff is there for a reason. The automatic management + zero customer support is dystopian to say the least.

Do the math (which I did for another in this post).

Saying nonsense to basic arithmetic is ignorant.

Don’t like the service, don’t use it. Same as every company.

Considering their profit is on the order of 100 billion, providing proper customer support does actually seem entirely realistic.

Meta net profit 2023 was $40B. Revenue is not profit.

AT&T has 100M customers, 40k customer service reps, avg wage $20/hr full time, i.e., $40k/year each.

If you simply scale this 5B customers would need 2M customer service reps. That’s $80B in wages. With no legal need, and since people use their services more by choice more than just about any other company’s product on the planet, it would seem they’re doing just fine.

Are they really customers if they don’t pay?

If they're not customers then there's really no need for customer support, right? So why would they complain? :)

How many billions do they make an hour? How many human hours of Indian and Philippine wages can they pay?

"We’re the search company. We don’t care ; we don’t have to".

Where do you think Google would rank its own support, help, etc., contact pages and info if not at the top of searches like the ones you mentioned?

The problem is the subjunctive here.

It's not where the _would_ rank ... it's where they currently _do_ rank.

In my test, the AI Overview produced accurate information ("Google does not offer phone support for account recovery") but none of the other hits on the first page say anything like "Phone support calls are always fraud. Google will not call you."

I think the point they are making is that google will let the fraudsters pay to place higher than the warnings because it's profitable to do so.

If there is only one time they would honor their fair market obligations and not raise their own rankings, it would be on a cost center like free tech support to consumers.

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