7 ms·

My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local S

My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.) The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutting you on price, etc, when you can CREATE YOUR OWN entity, get that ranked and then SELL the leads to that plumber. You're the one with 100% control and if the plumber isn't happy, there's a dozen others who'll gladly take those leads. Advanced lead gen owners use software such as MultiLogin along with mobile proxy farms to have hundreds of separate Chrome "entities" saved, all using different proxies, their own cookies, etc. This along with an infinite amount of other tools for call tracking, CTR manipulation, etc. Mobile proxies have really changed the game, giving these lead gen folks an advantage. Because of the nature of mobile proxies (where multiple people can "share an IP address"), it's more difficult to detect. Since EACH GBP entity can bring in thousands/month, it's miniscule in terms of cost. Reviews? Laughably easy to purchase and outsource, starting around $5/review. Combine this with fake Dalle images to attach to the review and/or GBP itself, and things can only get worse from here. Google has actually begun VIDEO verification where you literally have to facetime with a Google employee to verify you own the business you say you own... even this can be gamed since any type of manual verification will be outsourced. Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible.

fellellor 4y ago
Maybe this is why Google will lobby the government to restrict the distribution of open source AI models. https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1618705267801325568?s=61&t=sp6PY2PCiFLvb3cWufqTDw https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1618705267801325568?s=6...
cobertos 4y ago
The video calls must be new. When I first made a Google My Business profile, there was no verification. Not even address verification. And then I couldn't get the listing delisted from Google either (my friend made a prank listing). At some point they added postcard by mail verification. Then they added having to upload documents (articles of organization, pictures of store). And then the last time my account got suspended I had to make a video showing the above as well as including the cross streets in the video. It doesn't surprise me so many people are gaming this system because it's effectively a free pass to the top of local Google searches as well as getting into Maps searches.
- troydavis 4y ago
  One thing I don't understand is why many or most of these fake businesses weren't thwarted by postcard verification. I could only come up with a couple possibilities: - Google stopped doing postcard verification, or a loophole in the creation process lets savvy scammers avoid it (like an alternate verification method or providing a different address for the postcard). - New business entries go live before the postcard verification, and that period is long and lucrative enough to be worth exploiting. - They're paying local property owners to accept a postcard and read them the number - postcard mules. That seems hard to scale as big as some of these networks. Two of the "chains" had dozens of locations in one metro, all seemingly created in the same month or so. Also, some of the addresses seem like multi-unit commercial buildings where one person wouldn't receive a postcard.
  - TheCaptain4815 4y ago
    Getting an address = potentially thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in profit. Being creative on how you attain addresses is one of the main criteria for this business model. One unique method is working exclusively with a local plumber, electrician, etc and HAVING THEM get you the addresses while you retain control of the GBP entity and sell them the leads. The pitch goes like "you've seen the success I've had getting other clients tons of leads right? Get me 3-4 addresses in the cities you want to target and I can get them ranked" The client then asks around, uses their own address, etc to find them for you.
    - troydavis 4y ago
      Thank you. That makes sense for a lot of cases. I saw some business names that had 50+ locations in one city, but I guess given enough motivation, that can be done. Related: I submitted edits for some of the businesses (marking them "Doesn't exist") and Google rejected the edits. My Maps contribution history says "NOT APPLIED - Google couldn't verify your edit" for a long list of fake businesses. If that's how they process reports - about new businesses with obviously anomalous reviews - it's no wonder this continues.
jaycroft 4y ago
So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person coming to my house, and totally hassle free. How is Yelp dealing with this when Google can't seem to?
- schappim 4y ago
  I wouldn't give Yelp too much praise. It's been alleged that Yelp engages in astroturfing and unfair business practices[0], and the documentary "Billion Dollar Bully"[1] even accuses them of "Mob-Like Behavior". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully
  - jaycroft 4y ago
    Oh definitely - I can't say that I've had stellar experiences with Yelp in the past for restaurants, barbers, etc, from the consumer side, and I hear it is much worse as a business. I was just very surprised that in this niche Google performed so poorly and Yelp so well. I wouldn't go on to generalize from this experience though.
    - narrator 4y ago
      I have had great luck with Yelp. Maybe this is where Google's "no customer service" strategy starts to screw them up?
  - gmd63 4y ago
    The last time I used Yelp was when it asked me to install their app to use the full feature set.
- flir 4y ago
  Maybe nobody's trying to game Yelp because it's not the 800lb gorilla?
nextos 4y ago
This is interesting. I'm curious how do they achieve the opposite, i.e. deleting dozens of legitimate reviews from legitimate accounts when they have angry customers? What's the mechanism they use to convince Google to remove them?
2h 4y ago
> GBP Google Business Profile. its common courtesy to use the full name with the first use, THEN abbreviate.
- xxx6969xxx 4y ago
  (edit: deleted. sorry for engaging in this)
  - 2h 4y ago
    bad netiquette is rude. Forcing people to internet search a comment just to understand it is quite rude. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology
    - xxx6969xxx 4y ago
      (edit: deleted. sorry for engaging in this)
      - 2h 4y ago
        IF I think to insult them, I will make sure to take your comment into consideration. but since I HAVE NOT and do not intend to insult them, then it seems your point is moot.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NoToP 4y ago
  For Your Information (FYI) it's common...
  - tomrod 4y ago
    It's not common enough, apparently, because now you have more than one person reminding you about it.
moneywoes 4y ago
How is the address verification via street view passed?
Spooky23 4y ago
The weird thing is that it’s often impossible to manage your own GBP. I was on the board of a small private school where a couple of knucklehead students posted some weird reviews. We couldn’t do anything until I was able to leverage a high level google contact, which is something I hate to do.
- feet 4y ago
  Removing reviews should be difficult for the owner of a business. It seems weird to me that someone would think it appropriate for a business to remove reviews of their business as they see fit otherwise you just get business owners removing all bad reviews
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    It was a weird situation where the review ran afoul of policy, but the organization wasn’t able to respond in a way that allowed them to follow a Google process. (Ie someone set something up 15 years ago with a defunct domain name or similar, and there was an “orphaned” instance of the place.) The “fix” was to essentially reestablish the lost ownership of the business (which had paid Google Workspace and GCP presence) with their listing. Once they regained control, they were able to file a complaint and a Google reviewer removed the content. It wasn’t a situation of “This place sucks” getting taken down.
anamexis 4y ago
> Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible. Now, this part is funny. It's come full circle to a legitimate business. (Kind of)
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Key And Peele “Bank Heist” sketch[1]. 1: https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM
  - aaronharnly 4y ago
    Yes! Or the Mitchell & Webb farming sketch: https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE
- lubujackson 4y ago
  Kind of the same path Google attempted with SEO spam, making the easiest path to success actually producing content people spend time on and link to. Of course, this has devolved into the "life story before the recipe" sites that have become the shining failure of what can go wrong by focusing on these metrics.
  - hollerith 4y ago
    The incentive to put the story on the page along with the recipe comes not from Google, but rather from US copyright law, which has decided that a plain recipe is not copyrightable; there has to be some "personal expression".
    - 0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
      Is prepending useless text an attempt to stop copying of the recipe, or is there another incentive (besides SEO)?
hakfoo 4y ago
I have an interesting story in that vein. (genericised to avoid shaming anyone) Back in the late '00s I did development for a SEO-focused agency. We got a small firm that did a specific type of rental equipment. This was an industry that was traditionally very local and Yellow Pages oriented, to the point where leading brands were usually names like "A-Amazing AAA Aardvark Services". The page was good enough that it started ranking on out-of-region searches. So we built them a huge "directory" site. It had pages of spun content for almost every named city in the country, and we peppered it with a few listings of local service providers. It was on the edge of being an actual useful resource; they went to their industry trade show and could say "We're page 1 (and frequently result 1) for that service name in almost every city in the country." It had your usual late-2000s/early-2010s good-practice SEO stuff-- well-formed URLs, tidy redirects everywhere, a few paragraphs of text on every page. They started taking a listing fee, allowing coverage at a per-county level. It worked very well; getting real listings improved the actual user value of the rubbish content site and added further randomness to the generated content. But anyway, they got greedy. They still had people calling their central phone number and wanting them to do reservations for them, which let them take a much higher commission than a listing fee paid. We built them some tooling to manage that sort of reservations. This is essentially the business model the fake GBP you mention is, except that for one narrow segment of the country, they were the service provider. More importantly, they replaced all the individual vendor contact info with their own. They really wanted to hand over things to one of the owners' sons, who (along with the owner) had some very colourful pasts and questionable decision making abilities. So we let them go their own way, and continued to experiment with the model in other industries. Got good results in one other vertical, and a handful that just rotted on the vine. But when we turn away, the site starts tanking in rankings. Maybe SEO spam detection improved, maybe removing the phone numbers made it obvious there wasn't much real content there. They ended up making various frantic changes trying to salvage the flow, but it was never the same. When I left the agency in the late 2010s, they were making frantic rework efforts trying to recapture the lost magic. So I'd say the business concept can work, but it's weird how we have it being a SEO guy first. You'd think you'd find the service companies driving things-- by forming some sort of marketing/branding co-op with similar firms in different markets, they could split the costs of maintaining the SEO presence, and hiring a captive developer means they would be able to organize a flat rate dev contract rather than paying a high per-lead commission.
SteveGerencser 4y ago
What baffles me is how these networks flourish so easily yet Google can't tell a real business from a fake. The number of people calling me lately (I'm in the same business) about the Business Profile being removed by Google. Even active retail shops that have had their account for many years, with a clearly visibly business on Google maps. Their GBP simply vanishes and in a few cases, the only solution was to simply start over with a new profile.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TylerE 4y ago
  Can’t tell or doesn’t care?
- tomcam 4y ago
  How can they start over with a new profile? It seems to me they would have to either move or get a new business name? I’m not trying to bust your chops. I am genuinely interested in this whole thing.
  - SteveGerencser 4y ago
    It was actually suggested by someone at the BGP support team. We had a different employee there create the new listing while sitting in the store. It went live with 24 hours, only none of the old reviews, pictures, or reviews were there. So they are starting over on that front. this makes me think that they felt like some other aspect of that GBP was why they deleted it. But since they won't tell us why, we have no idea. I could guess, but any guess is just that, a guess.
- miohtama 4y ago
  Google has more data and more money than anyone on this planet, so they easily could tell fakes apart from real ones if they really wanted. The question is why they do not want to do so ... Will end up another dumb topic to be regulated in the EU in the future.
- 4y ago
ajross 4y ago
I'm with you up to this point: > Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible. So... the real masters of the business model are the ones... actually operating the businesses they claim to be operating?
- Spivak 4y ago
  The difference is that these companies figured out that the real business is SEO and leadgen and the actual work is secondary. The capital H hard problem isn’t plumbing it’s finding work. Once you own the sales funnel it’s game over for anyone else.
jfoster 4y ago
> they will quite literally start their own company and will hire At that point... Are they even fake anymore?
- mistrial9 4y ago
  this is a serious question, and the answers bring the reader back to the fundamental promises of a civil society.. not at all simple
rustdeveloper 4y ago
There are tutorials for building you own mobile proxy pool so it’s very accessible these days: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scraping https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...
pjc50 4y ago
> Google has actually begun VIDEO verification where you literally have to facetime with a Google employee to verify you own the business you say you own... even this can be gamed since any type of manual verification will be outsourced. I feel that this is going to be a big negative externality of AI: since it makes faking everything much easier, all verification processes will become more difficult and expensive. Eventually there will start being "you must come to this office and present ID" steps, with all the associated costs.
wendyshu 4y ago
A difficult comment to understand. I had no idea what GBP was and had only a rough idea what was being said thereafter.
- turtleyacht 4y ago
  GBP is a Google Business Profile. Someone can create a bunch of them, using some evasive techniques to avoid Google identifying them as one person. When people call asking for service, that's a potential lead. This info could be sold to a contractor. The other piece is making the GBP compelling enough--through fake reviews, submitted by web browsers running on separate IPs--to have folks contact them. More ambitiously, the person doing this creates their own business, hiring out service crews to do the work and capturing more of the profit.
antihero 4y ago
I appreciate your honesty but you are dooming civilisation

fellellor 4y ago

Maybe this is why Google will lobby the government to restrict the distribution of open source AI models. https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1618705267801325568?s=61&t=sp6PY2PCiFLvb3cWufqTDw https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1618705267801325568?s=6...

cobertos 4y ago

The video calls must be new. When I first made a Google My Business profile, there was no verification. Not even address verification. And then I couldn't get the listing delisted from Google either (my friend made a prank listing). At some point they added postcard by mail verification. Then they added having to upload documents (articles of organization, pictures of store). And then the last time my account got suspended I had to make a video showing the above as well as including the cross streets in the video. It doesn't surprise me so many people are gaming this system because it's effectively a free pass to the top of local Google searches as well as getting into Maps searches.

troydavis 4y ago
One thing I don't understand is why many or most of these fake businesses weren't thwarted by postcard verification. I could only come up with a couple possibilities: - Google stopped doing postcard verification, or a loophole in the creation process lets savvy scammers avoid it (like an alternate verification method or providing a different address for the postcard). - New business entries go live before the postcard verification, and that period is long and lucrative enough to be worth exploiting. - They're paying local property owners to accept a postcard and read them the number - postcard mules. That seems hard to scale as big as some of these networks. Two of the "chains" had dozens of locations in one metro, all seemingly created in the same month or so. Also, some of the addresses seem like multi-unit commercial buildings where one person wouldn't receive a postcard.
- TheCaptain4815 4y ago
  Getting an address = potentially thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in profit. Being creative on how you attain addresses is one of the main criteria for this business model. One unique method is working exclusively with a local plumber, electrician, etc and HAVING THEM get you the addresses while you retain control of the GBP entity and sell them the leads. The pitch goes like "you've seen the success I've had getting other clients tons of leads right? Get me 3-4 addresses in the cities you want to target and I can get them ranked" The client then asks around, uses their own address, etc to find them for you.
  - troydavis 4y ago
    Thank you. That makes sense for a lot of cases. I saw some business names that had 50+ locations in one city, but I guess given enough motivation, that can be done. Related: I submitted edits for some of the businesses (marking them "Doesn't exist") and Google rejected the edits. My Maps contribution history says "NOT APPLIED - Google couldn't verify your edit" for a long list of fake businesses. If that's how they process reports - about new businesses with obviously anomalous reviews - it's no wonder this continues.

jaycroft 4y ago

So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person coming to my house, and totally hassle free. How is Yelp dealing with this when Google can't seem to?

schappim 4y ago
I wouldn't give Yelp too much praise. It's been alleged that Yelp engages in astroturfing and unfair business practices[0], and the documentary "Billion Dollar Bully"[1] even accuses them of "Mob-Like Behavior". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully
- jaycroft 4y ago
  Oh definitely - I can't say that I've had stellar experiences with Yelp in the past for restaurants, barbers, etc, from the consumer side, and I hear it is much worse as a business. I was just very surprised that in this niche Google performed so poorly and Yelp so well. I wouldn't go on to generalize from this experience though.
  - narrator 4y ago
    I have had great luck with Yelp. Maybe this is where Google's "no customer service" strategy starts to screw them up?
- gmd63 4y ago
  The last time I used Yelp was when it asked me to install their app to use the full feature set.
flir 4y ago
Maybe nobody's trying to game Yelp because it's not the 800lb gorilla?

nextos 4y ago

This is interesting. I'm curious how do they achieve the opposite, i.e. deleting dozens of legitimate reviews from legitimate accounts when they have angry customers? What's the mechanism they use to convince Google to remove them?

2h 4y ago

> GBP Google Business Profile. its common courtesy to use the full name with the first use, THEN abbreviate.

xxx6969xxx 4y ago
(edit: deleted. sorry for engaging in this)
- 2h 4y ago
  bad netiquette is rude. Forcing people to internet search a comment just to understand it is quite rude. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology
  - xxx6969xxx 4y ago
    (edit: deleted. sorry for engaging in this)
    - 2h 4y ago
      IF I think to insult them, I will make sure to take your comment into consideration. but since I HAVE NOT and do not intend to insult them, then it seems your point is moot.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
NoToP 4y ago
For Your Information (FYI) it's common...
- tomrod 4y ago
  It's not common enough, apparently, because now you have more than one person reminding you about it.

moneywoes 4y ago

How is the address verification via street view passed?

Spooky23 4y ago

The weird thing is that it’s often impossible to manage your own GBP. I was on the board of a small private school where a couple of knucklehead students posted some weird reviews. We couldn’t do anything until I was able to leverage a high level google contact, which is something I hate to do.

feet 4y ago
Removing reviews should be difficult for the owner of a business. It seems weird to me that someone would think it appropriate for a business to remove reviews of their business as they see fit otherwise you just get business owners removing all bad reviews
- Spooky23 4y ago
  It was a weird situation where the review ran afoul of policy, but the organization wasn’t able to respond in a way that allowed them to follow a Google process. (Ie someone set something up 15 years ago with a defunct domain name or similar, and there was an “orphaned” instance of the place.) The “fix” was to essentially reestablish the lost ownership of the business (which had paid Google Workspace and GCP presence) with their listing. Once they regained control, they were able to file a complaint and a Google reviewer removed the content. It wasn’t a situation of “This place sucks” getting taken down.

anamexis 4y ago

> Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible. Now, this part is funny. It's come full circle to a legitimate business. (Kind of)

ryandrake 4y ago
Reminds me of the Key And Peele “Bank Heist” sketch[1]. 1: https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM
- aaronharnly 4y ago
  Yes! Or the Mitchell & Webb farming sketch: https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE
lubujackson 4y ago
Kind of the same path Google attempted with SEO spam, making the easiest path to success actually producing content people spend time on and link to. Of course, this has devolved into the "life story before the recipe" sites that have become the shining failure of what can go wrong by focusing on these metrics.
- hollerith 4y ago
  The incentive to put the story on the page along with the recipe comes not from Google, but rather from US copyright law, which has decided that a plain recipe is not copyrightable; there has to be some "personal expression".
  - 0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
    Is prepending useless text an attempt to stop copying of the recipe, or is there another incentive (besides SEO)?

hakfoo 4y ago

I have an interesting story in that vein. (genericised to avoid shaming anyone) Back in the late '00s I did development for a SEO-focused agency. We got a small firm that did a specific type of rental equipment. This was an industry that was traditionally very local and Yellow Pages oriented, to the point where leading brands were usually names like "A-Amazing AAA Aardvark Services". The page was good enough that it started ranking on out-of-region searches. So we built them a huge "directory" site. It had pages of spun content for almost every named city in the country, and we peppered it with a few listings of local service providers. It was on the edge of being an actual useful resource; they went to their industry trade show and could say "We're page 1 (and frequently result 1) for that service name in almost every city in the country." It had your usual late-2000s/early-2010s good-practice SEO stuff-- well-formed URLs, tidy redirects everywhere, a few paragraphs of text on every page. They started taking a listing fee, allowing coverage at a per-county level. It worked very well; getting real listings improved the actual user value of the rubbish content site and added further randomness to the generated content. But anyway, they got greedy. They still had people calling their central phone number and wanting them to do reservations for them, which let them take a much higher commission than a listing fee paid. We built them some tooling to manage that sort of reservations. This is essentially the business model the fake GBP you mention is, except that for one narrow segment of the country, they were the service provider. More importantly, they replaced all the individual vendor contact info with their own. They really wanted to hand over things to one of the owners' sons, who (along with the owner) had some very colourful pasts and questionable decision making abilities. So we let them go their own way, and continued to experiment with the model in other industries. Got good results in one other vertical, and a handful that just rotted on the vine. But when we turn away, the site starts tanking in rankings. Maybe SEO spam detection improved, maybe removing the phone numbers made it obvious there wasn't much real content there. They ended up making various frantic changes trying to salvage the flow, but it was never the same. When I left the agency in the late 2010s, they were making frantic rework efforts trying to recapture the lost magic. So I'd say the business concept can work, but it's weird how we have it being a SEO guy first. You'd think you'd find the service companies driving things-- by forming some sort of marketing/branding co-op with similar firms in different markets, they could split the costs of maintaining the SEO presence, and hiring a captive developer means they would be able to organize a flat rate dev contract rather than paying a high per-lead commission.

SteveGerencser 4y ago

What baffles me is how these networks flourish so easily yet Google can't tell a real business from a fake. The number of people calling me lately (I'm in the same business) about the Business Profile being removed by Google. Even active retail shops that have had their account for many years, with a clearly visibly business on Google maps. Their GBP simply vanishes and in a few cases, the only solution was to simply start over with a new profile.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TylerE 4y ago
Can’t tell or doesn’t care?
tomcam 4y ago
How can they start over with a new profile? It seems to me they would have to either move or get a new business name? I’m not trying to bust your chops. I am genuinely interested in this whole thing.
- SteveGerencser 4y ago
  It was actually suggested by someone at the BGP support team. We had a different employee there create the new listing while sitting in the store. It went live with 24 hours, only none of the old reviews, pictures, or reviews were there. So they are starting over on that front. this makes me think that they felt like some other aspect of that GBP was why they deleted it. But since they won't tell us why, we have no idea. I could guess, but any guess is just that, a guess.
miohtama 4y ago
Google has more data and more money than anyone on this planet, so they easily could tell fakes apart from real ones if they really wanted. The question is why they do not want to do so ... Will end up another dumb topic to be regulated in the EU in the future.
4y ago

ajross 4y ago

I'm with you up to this point: > Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible. So... the real masters of the business model are the ones... actually operating the businesses they claim to be operating?

Spivak 4y ago
The difference is that these companies figured out that the real business is SEO and leadgen and the actual work is secondary. The capital H hard problem isn’t plumbing it’s finding work. Once you own the sales funnel it’s game over for anyone else.

jfoster 4y ago

> they will quite literally start their own company and will hire At that point... Are they even fake anymore?

mistrial9 4y ago
this is a serious question, and the answers bring the reader back to the fundamental promises of a civil society.. not at all simple

rustdeveloper 4y ago

There are tutorials for building you own mobile proxy pool so it’s very accessible these days: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scraping https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

pjc50 4y ago

> Google has actually begun VIDEO verification where you literally have to facetime with a Google employee to verify you own the business you say you own... even this can be gamed since any type of manual verification will be outsourced. I feel that this is going to be a big negative externality of AI: since it makes faking everything much easier, all verification processes will become more difficult and expensive. Eventually there will start being "you must come to this office and present ID" steps, with all the associated costs.

wendyshu 4y ago

A difficult comment to understand. I had no idea what GBP was and had only a rough idea what was being said thereafter.

turtleyacht 4y ago
GBP is a Google Business Profile. Someone can create a bunch of them, using some evasive techniques to avoid Google identifying them as one person. When people call asking for service, that's a potential lead. This info could be sold to a contractor. The other piece is making the GBP compelling enough--through fake reviews, submitted by web browsers running on separate IPs--to have folks contact them. More ambitiously, the person doing this creates their own business, hiring out service crews to do the work and capturing more of the profit.

antihero 4y ago

I appreciate your honesty but you are dooming civilisation