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Bookwell.com.au is registering businesses without their consent
I'm pretty sure this is not ethical. It may even be borderline legal if legal at all.
My girlfriend has a salon and a personal booking system. Her name is a trademark registered in Australia.
Here we were looking at google searching for her business when we see a page with her name in the first page of a Google result. On the page I can see her logo, and a list of services (with links that go to nowhere) with the banner at the bottom "this business accepts phone bookings only". The banner contains a link to her personal phone number.
This is outrageous. We immediately sent a takedown notice by email.
The website is bookwell.com.au. I've made a research and they're doing this for a lot of business in Sydney. Most, if not all business, have no idea that they were registered on the website. I've asked a few customers of a business and they said they're trying to book with the business but they can't cause they find it through Google. Of course, they can't, because of the fact they have been registered without their permission.
Using the tactic of registering the business without their permission, crawling for the business number, adding services that the business does not provide, along with a significant investment in SEO, the website bookwell.com.au is deceiving customers of several businesses in a desperate attempt to acquire relevance.
This is YCombinator. What about the Startups or side-projects that you own or work with. Do you apply this tactic too?