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Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps
- lwhi 8y agoA local taxi company near me was relisted on Google maps using a pay-per-minute redirect service. The scammers get paid, and the customer is non the wiser until they get their bill. I was charged about £5 for a 30 second call.
- notimetorelax 8y agoWere you able to dispute this charge?
- lwhi 8y agoI told my phone company, they wouldn't refund. I also reported the number to the communications ombudsman .. haven't heard anything since unfortunately.
- wahnfrieden 8y agoWhat would be a legitimate use case for redirect services?
- hpbd 8y agoIf you own a business, you give your redirect, expensive number to clients you don't care much about so they don't call bitching about stuff (quality of whatever you sell, etc) and then you give your direct, free number to clients you don't want to lose.
- avip 8y agoOnce upon a time redirects were used as pricing mechanism for phone-based "apis". So you could call some weather forecast, or sports analysis, yada yada. I don't know if these still exist, it would not surprise me if redirects are used mainly for fraud nowadays (they are huge in voip call centres breaches).
- govg 8y agoBelieve Shazam also started as such a dial in service.
- ljf 8y agoIndeed - I bought some early Bluetooth headphones that have a 'shazam' button, and pressing it would Dail their 4 it 5 digit UK number at the time. I think it was something like 2580 (the numbers straight down the centre of the dial pad.) Calls were capped at 50p I think and you got an sms response with the song title and artist fairly swiftly. Strange how fast things change hey! Old news article about shazam and aqa https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/shazam-aqa-the-answer-is-on-your-mobile/ https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/shazam-aqa-the-answer-is-on-you...
- reaperducer 8y agoWhen they were big in the U.S. (976-xxxx days, before they moved to 900-xxx-xxxx), they were mostly astrologers, fortune tellers, and phone sex lines. The only one I've seen in a very long time was for a psychic reading over the phone. "I predict... you will lose a modest amount of money...."
- lwhi 8y agoThis company described the service as 'revenue sharing' .. http://www.callagenix.com/numbers/090x-premium-rate-numbers http://www.callagenix.com/numbers/090x-premium-rate-numbers
- brianbreslin 8y agoI didn't know they even had pay-per-minute services anymore. Does Twilio allow someone to set one up?
- tommyanthony 8y agoHi, I work on maps spam. I was wondering if you could dig up a link to the maps business, and include a rough idea of when this occurred. Thanks!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- edent 8y agoI've tried to report this map spam before - details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/04/hundreds-of-thousands-of-spam-listings-on-google-my-maps/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/04/hundreds-of-thousands-of-sp... Happy to be contacted if you'd like more information.
- jpatokal 8y agoYour blog post appears to be conflating Google Maps with MyMaps. MyMaps lets people create & publish their own maps with random POIs: for example, here's a map of nice wineries around Melbourne. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mtgpe7JU9OtHUUdvG_A6Uq0eTpQ&usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mtgpe7JU9OtHUUdvG_A6Uq0eTp... However, these do not show up in the "main" Google Maps, and adding spam to them isn't any more effective than adding spam to a random website. Disclaimer: I used to work at Google Maps.
- edent 8y agoI mean, the url for these spam entries starts "Google.com/maps" so I think it is pretty reasonable to call this Google Maps spam. I don't remember how I found those specific ones, but using Google Maps for Android finds some pretty similar entries. Perhaps you could pass that on to your old team?
- Symbiote 8y agoThe UK phone number plan allocates the prefix 09… (or +44 9…) to premium rate numbers[1]. A change to an 09 number should be a red flag for the edit — I'd expect very, very few businesses to use a premium rate number as their main contact number. In fact, it seems many categories of business are banned from using them [2]. Some other European countries have similar prefix-based number allocation systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_Unite... [2] http://www.fairtelecoms.org.uk/service-numbers-084-087-09-and-118.html http://www.fairtelecoms.org.uk/service-numbers-084-087-09-an...
- MagicPropmaker 8y agoThat is amazing! IIRC in the U.S. there's a few second "grace period" where there's supposed to be an announcement that says "this call is $2 a minute" where you can hang up immediately and not get charged. I presume that's not how it works where you are!
- lwhi 8y agoIt unfortunately isn't!
- x0054 8y agoI thought those were restricted to specific area codes. I think the phone company should be liable in scams like this. Also, there should be a way to block all pay-per-min calls on your phone. This is one of those areas government needs to regulate.
- Symbiote 8y agoAll premium rate numbers in the UK begin 09. (0870 is "national rate", which can be more expensive than it ought to be, but not to the level available on 09 numbers.)
- tonylemesmer 8y agoYep, years ago, we needed to call the NHS (out of hours doctor) and looked it up on Google, first result (sponsored) turned out to be a premium rate pay per minute redirect number. That turned out to be a £90, 30 minute call when we got our bill. I believe this practice is now harder to do or not possible.
- mnw21cam 8y agoIs it so hard to remember the number "111"?
- tonylemesmer 8y agoIt wasn’t 111 years ago when we needed it.
- pasbesoin 8y agoA couple of years ago, I needed to find a limo service for an old family friend, for a memorial service. It'd been some years, but I knew of and used to use one of the top two limo services in my metropolitan area. (In my area, in a perverse historical twist, a shared limo ride to the airport was substantially cheaper than a cab ride, as well as pretty much guaranteed timely as well as more comfortable.) I'd heard that this was one business area where fly by night companies, and outright scammers, had been stuffing and, where possible, gaming search engine results -- meaning, given their market dominance, Google results. I searched for the company -- mind you, a relatively large livery service with a diverse and well-heeled customer base, sure to still be in existence -- and sure enough, the search results were full of hits purporting to be them or part of them, or just playing on minor variations of their name. If nothing else, the phone numbers didn't look right to me as compared to my vague memory, formed back when people still dialed numbers. Anyway, eventually I pulled out an old, physical yellow pages I'd been hoarding, looked them up in that, and called. They had changed that particular number, although not to something looking like one of the scam results. They had numbers from back when people faced in-state toll charges on phone calls, and since they covered an entire large metropolitan area, they had at that time registered numbers in several local exchanges, to make customer calls to them a local call (just pick the number having a local or non-toll exchange). They still had the number from the yellow pages, though, assigned to an internal extension, and the person who answered took time out of their day to provide first rate customer service for the family friend. The first rate service was still there. However, finding it through a Google search was a risky venture. I'm not at all surprised that Maps contents is being exploited and gamed. I guess I'll hold on to that old yellow pages book a bit longer.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoDid you check if the number listed on Google reached them too?
- techsupporter 8y ago> They had numbers from back when people faced in-state toll charges on phone calls, and since they covered an entire large metropolitan area, they had at that time registered numbers in several local exchanges, to make customer calls to them a local call (just pick the number having a local or non-toll exchange). Totally unrelated to people scamming others on Google, but I love little bits of telephone trivia like this. A large plumber and an unrelated large handyman company in my hometown metro both have the same style of phone number: "just dial your area code then [seven digits]." One other thing we had growing up in that area were the concept of "metro numbers." Back in the day, the area was divided up into three different incumbents and it wasn't always the case that a person physically near you would have a number you could call for free. So metro numbers were ones in specific exchanges that anyone in the six-county area could call with no toll charges. Since all metro numbers were in a handful of exchanges and, because the three old incumbents crossed area codes as well, didn't always follow area code rules (e.g. you could be physically in area code 123 but get a metro number in area code 198), you'll see old businesses with old numbers in area codes where they "shouldn't be." My mobile number is like this. It is a metro number and has an area code and prefix of one side of the metro area but if you look it up in any of the telco databases, those listings say it is "homed" to two counties away in a different area code.
- dawnerd 8y agoI do a lot of Google Maps moderation and there’s a ton of bad changes being attempted every day. Honestly I’m amazed Google doesn’t bother to vet anyone really. Becoming a local guide is easy and not that difficult for a spam group to create enough fake accounts to get things pushed through. Just last night I caught the local Target that was reclassified as a “prison”. What Google needs to do is lock information for verified businesses or businesses they’re directly scraping from the Corp location pages.
- amelius 8y agoIn turn, I'm amazed that people put effort into databases that are owned by companies. Wouldn't it be much more fulfilling to do the same work for an open database, such as open street maps?
- taeric 8y agoDo they do a better job combating this style of fraud?
- nordsieck 8y ago> In turn, I'm amazed that people put effort into databases that are owned by companies. Wouldn't it be much more fulfilling to do the same work for an open database, such as open street maps? There are tons of open source developers who contribute to code bases that require copyright assignment. They probably do it for the same reasons: * It's personally useful * It's useful to a lot of people * It's (comparatively) easy to do * It's rewarding in some other way
- joshstrange 8y ago@dang I know "Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps to defraud people" is 4 characters too long but maybe "Scammers changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps to defraud people" is better than what it currently is? "changing the contact" alone doesn't make a lot of sense.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mattnewton 8y agoOr drop people: “Scammers are changing the contact info for banks on Google Maps to defraud”
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoThe the is supefluous too: "Scammers changing contact details of banks on Google Maps [to defraud]". But the "defraud" coming at the end and not being just "fraud" is poor in English. However, "scammers" are pretty much synonymous with "fraudsters", so the "to defraud" is probably superfluous too.
- namibj 8y agoI hope you apply the same reductionism to problem solving as well. Got any tips on using it in practice (you seem to be at a higher skill level than most)?
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoI try, I'm not an engineer, my critical faculties are better than my constructive ones -- I do think I'm pretty good at succinct and accurate writing though. Unfortunately I'm not able to make best use of these skills at present. What field do you work in?
- abtom 8y agoThe same thing happened to a cousin of mine. I wrote a (somewhat more detailed than this article) blog post about it a month ago. Didn't gain any traction on HN then but here it is: http://blog.abhijittomar.com/2018/10/19/google-business-claim-scam/ http://blog.abhijittomar.com/2018/10/19/google-business-clai...
- dang 8y agoYes, that's a good article and has more detail than either the submitted url (https://www.businessinsider.com/scammers-edit-google-maps-bank-listings-fraud-2018-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/scammers-edit-google-maps-ba...) or the one it points to https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/a-new-bank-scam-using-google-maps-loophole/article25541414.ece https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/a-new-bank-scam..., so we've switched to it above. Hopefully it will gain some traction on HN now. (You won't get the HN karma, but we plan to implement karma sharing for cases where multiple submitters contributed.)
- abtom 8y agoThank you. I've added the news links to my article for reference as well.
- olivermarks 8y agoI check phone numbers with yellowpages.com if I'm unsure, we've come full circle...
- askvictor 8y agoHow do you know this is legit? Does the yellow pages verify every listing? If a company neglects to register a yellow pages slot, how hard is it for someone else to register it? Genuine questions (and I'd guess it changes by country); Google does a fair bit of effort to get business owner to claim their property on Google (again, probably changes by country); if they don't do so, then how different is it to someone neglecting to put their yellow pages entry in?
- olivermarks 8y ago@askvictor Not guaranteed legit but possibly less likely to be abused than GMaps. https://business.yellowpages.ca/onboarding/#/search https://business.yellowpages.ca/onboarding/#/search I actually look at the local paper book yellow pages sometimes for local businesses - sometimes you find good people who haven't bothered to get online.
- ams6110 8y agoYou have to pay to be in the yellow pages, so that both discourages scammers and provides identity confirmation (bank account or credit card number)
- askvictor 8y agoProbably a small price to pay for scammers, and I wonder/doubt if anyone actually confirms the details - yes, it might be possible after the fact, but by that point the damage is done.
- w8rbt 8y agoAlso good to verify the phone number on the company website.
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- ams6110 8y agoI basically don't trust the search engine "summary" info that is presented in search results. I always go to the actual website of the business to get contact info, addresses, etc.
- specialp 8y agoIf Google is going to have customers remain on their site for search information they have the duty to ensure it is accurate. More and more searches are now given a placard that is either community generated or scraped whether it be maps or the main search. A search that used to feature a link to the bank's "Contact Us" page is now being taken by Google with the link being buried further down between more ads. I get this is to help Google provide voice searches (with the great side effect that Google gets people spending more time on their site), but with that revenue comes a responsibility to do more to ensure it is accurate.
- phkahler 8y agoMost people want to remain anonymous on the internet or have disposable IDs and profiles. And yet they expect Google to somehow ensure that people are who they say they are. This is a hard problem and it won't be solved as long as people want it both ways.
- jakelazaroff 8y agoIt's not that people don't want to ever be identified, it's that they don't want to constantly be identified and tracked with no way to opt out. This is also a false dichotomy: Google not tracking us online would not prevent it from verifying our true identities with regard to e.g. editing maps information.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoWe expect Google to ensure that businesses are who they say they are.
- Drdrdrq 8y agoOr, at least they could accompany the non-verified details with labels that clearly marked them as such ("Unverified phone number: ...").
- reaperducer 8y agothey have the duty to ensure it is accurate Accuracy doesn't pay. Giving results that are "pretty close" keeps people searching and searching and searching for what they need, and racks up the ad dollars.
- seanieb 8y agoA very well known CA company uses these details as a method of verification for EV certs.
- adiian 8y agoIn 2014 Bryan Seely wiretapped FBI and Secret Service exploiting the Google maps (lack of) verification process. According to his tedtalk, Google was not to eager to fix the problem and it seems things didn't change much since then. https://youtu.be/5c6AADI7Pb4 https://youtu.be/5c6AADI7Pb4
- PaulHoule 8y agoI am lol as I changed the profile picture for one country's central bank a long time ago because I was dumbstruck by the offer to "Claim this business" and just had to try it out. It has been fun watching the edit wars over the hours of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. There are times it has been OPEN and times it has been CLOSED and times when it is OPEN for 2 hours on the weekend, presumably for a pickup of household radioactive waste.
- tmkc13 8y agoNot to blame the victim, but this is an apt example of social engineering at work. The so-called 'educated' person in question is not too aware I guess. All the banking institutions send you a gazillion emails about not sharing your card information ever with any employee. In fact it has come to a point that the government of India runs TV ad campaigns regarding this on all the channels under the sun. So the ignorance of the victim is to blame for this as well.
- tgb 8y agoSo how will this work with the new Google Duplex ai assistant auto calling a scammer for you? Yikes.
- WheelsAtLarge 8y agoI got burned by a similar scam with information changes in google. I was looking for a specific restaurant in google and used the given address to get there. When I got there I found out it was a different restaurant. I asked about the other restaurant and they told me the other restaurant had gone out of business. A complete lie. I'm sure they hired a company to promote them and they used this trick to increase their customer base. Never trust the company info google gives you without double checking. It's very easy for anyone to change the business info without proof of ownership.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoI don’t initially trust anything on he internet without second source verification. The internet is just one big scam pot today and at the same time, since using it before wide spread public use, I’m fascinated with watching it evolve, devolve since then.
- WheelsAtLarge 8y agoNot the internet per se, scams are all over society. It's sad but true.
- reaperducer 8y agoCould very well be a scam. Or it could just be that the big tech companies really suck at information verification. My small company gets three or four phone calls or e-mails a week from people who think it's a different business, and each time I ask, they say they got the number from Google. Looking at my e-mail, the most recent one was from someone who wanted to place a big catering order with a Subway sandwich shop about 2,000 miles away. I don't blame Google exclusively, though. For almost ten years, Facebook has been telling people that I am a large building in another state.
- Buge 8y ago>A complete lie. How do you know it's a lie?
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- starik36 8y agoThere is some scam going on in Lake Powell, AZ. We visited there in September and yelped a well reviewed place: CNG Burgers. We arrive there and can't find it. It simply isn't there. And not just isn't there - there is NO trace of it on the building that matched the address (like where there would a lighter shade of paint behind where the restaurant sign was - at least according to the photos on Google Maps). Oh well, onto the restaurant across the street. Asked the waitress there about CNG Burgers - she's never heard of it and said that she's worked there for a year. I looked on Google Maps and CNG received a ton of recent reviews. Reading this thread compelled me to look at it again. Finally, Yelp is listing it as closed (I reported it as such), however, there are reviews as recent as 2 weeks ago. On Google Maps, it's still active - all recent reviews by Local Guides. Still not sure what it all means.
- ksherlock 8y agoThis one? http://pageburgers.com/directions.html http://pageburgers.com/directions.html Google maps has an image capture from May 2018 with their sign up.
- starik36 8y agoI know. https://i.imgur.com/s5qesHC.jpg https://i.imgur.com/s5qesHC.jpg Except, the restaurant is not there. None of the signs are on the building except for Lake Powell Realty. Not the "Restaurant" sign on the left, not the CNG Burgers sign in the middle. And the reviews kept on coming even after we left.
- soared 8y agoSo its closed and google hasn’t removed it. The restaurant bought some fake reviews that are still coming in. This isn’t a scam like the article is talking about, just google failing to update a listing and letting in bad reviews.
- WheelsAtLarge 8y agoThere's a new business model where a restaurant is just a kitchen that delivers. No need for a dining place. Uber eats and such give new restaurant owners the flexibility. Given that the majority of new restaurants fail within 5 years, this is a great option. This could be the case with CNG Burgers. Some companies decide that they should have a physical address for places like Yelp. I suspect you have to have an address for people to review your business. Is it a scam? In some sense yes but what do you if all you want to do is deliver?
- TomJoeJohn 8y agoIn fact, if you live in China, you will know that the information provided by search engines is not always right. Some frauds are even carried out with the help of search engines, for example, putian
- darkhorn 8y agoWhy he didn't call the phone number on his debit card or bank's web site?!
- rlyshw 8y agoIn college I was somehow made the owner or something of my department building’s google maps entry. I worked for the department, so my .edu google account was in some admin/staff group I guess. I kept getting emails asking me to update the listing and definitely considered some harmless pranks/light vandalism.
- cyberjunkie 8y agoI've seen more than a couple instances of terrible addresses being marked on Google Maps. Painful while ordering food or taking an Uber.
- sytelus 8y agoI've considered myself fairly resistive to various devious scamming efforts but recently they have upped the game at completely new level. Other day I received text message that my XYZ card had suspicious charge and my card was disabled. To re-enable the card I must call 1-800- number. I absolutely believed that! That number is in fact fake number to get all your bank details! These are clear attempt for theft. For physical attempts I would call police and that's one of the big restraint on rampant theft attempts. But there is no law enforcement infrastructure set up to report and act on electronic thefts easily. These thieves can easily be traced otherwise as their 1-800- numbers are public.
- deckar01 8y agoIf you are in the US you can submit reports to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). https://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx https://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoWhen I've had these I've always called the number on my card instead.
- mnw21cam 8y agoWhich is exactly what you should do. Or look up the number from the bank's own secure web site.
- ruffrey 8y agoReminds me of the time I claimed the Google SF office on Google maps.
- franga2000 8y agoWait, Google is seriously just taking people's word for this stuff? What happened to the Semantic Web and getting information from official websites? They've essentially created OpenStreetMap, but with less transparency.
- rchaud 8y agoI work at a major community development charity in Canada with 100+ branches across the country. Almost every day, I have to log into Google My Business to reject the "user-suggested edits" made to a particular location's phone number or street address. Half the time, it seems Google auto-approves these user edits, so we get complaints from clients who used the Google info and showed up when the office was closed. Almost all the time, people will see the address/number listed on Google's search engine snippet, which is larger, has an image and is much more conspicuous than anything else on the screen. They'll make their plans around that, instead of clicking on the #1 search result, which is our website showing the official hours. It's incredibly irresponsible for Google to let any Tom Dick and Harry make changes to this type of information, and then display it to the world without posting so much as a disclaimer to users to verify with the actual site.
- atmosx 8y agoMaybe you can sue Google for negligence.