A report today from Mike Blumenthal discusses how team members from Google Maps have been phoning local businesses.
“Google has confirmed that as part of that additional level of verification, they have been calling businesses to find out business name and address.”
Over the last year, our flower shop has receiving a large number of calls (mostly from India) from IYPs asking us to verify our business information. Unfortunately, these types of calls have a well-known history of being used by scammers to elicit ‘yes’ answers to cram phone bills with bogus charges.
We’ve also received at least a dozen calls from companies claiming to represent Google Local (now Place Pages) with promises of #1 rankings – if we’ll only ‘verify’ our information and send them checks for about $300 per month. Sure.
So you can bet small businesses will be hesitant to answer Google’s queries – especially if the callers sound off-shore.
Miriam Ellis gives a terrific outline of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of this new call program over at Search Engine Guide and both she and David Mihm suggest Google send advance emails alerting businesses about the calls. Count me in the camp that sees this more as a ‘heads up’ warning to spammers to be on the alert for the verifications meant to catch them using geographic misrepresentation.
Rather than identifying themselves as Google employees, why not just call like normal customers would – and ask for the businesses’ addresses? Home-based and come-to-you businesses have mailing addresses (which they were required to provide when claiming their listings) so the odds of getting a verified answer should be high – for real local businesses.
A tip to the Google staffers: Over the phone, phony local florists usually answer “Flower Shop”, don’t give out street addresses, say they’re just off Main Street or Church Street and are located near the Pizza Hut or Dairy Queen. That description pretty much works for any city. 😉
For legit local businesses, DO take Miriam’s advice and don’t hang up!
Good should do this to avoid fake entries. I see many fake florist entries in many directories.
In complete agreement with Chezbloom.
While I understand Google not wanting to identify themselves for the very good reason of verification, they need to understand that small businesses have dealt with so many scams that they are decidedly reluctant to deal with any call seeming even slightly out of the ordinary. We are such targets to scammers that we have become diligently cynical.
This blog asks the obvious question – why not just call and ask for the address?
Thanks for the heads up!
I’ve told my staff they can verify our business name, address, and phone number. That’s it. No emails, individual names, number of employees, name of credit card processor, phone service, etc. I don’t care if it’s Google, D & B, or a phone company.
With the present situation in online business, scammers play around. Businesses have dealt this kind of situation that is why some were hesitant in providing information. There are possibilities that they wouldn’t mind the google queries because they are confused for the intentions which it might be a scam. Google should really send advance email if they want to coordinate with businesses. Thank you for this post because it really helps and a good source.
I agree, if Google plans to call they should simply ask for the address and if the business refuses to provide a real street address, its a good sign something is wrong. A legitimite business would’nt hesitate to give their address and even driving directions. This seems a very archaic way of confirming a legit biz.
This is a good decision by google. This will avoid lot spam sites and helps real florist.
Google should do this. The flower business is being affected by the spammers a lot. Google should call the local business and verify the phone numbers and address.