Google Maps Scams

Most people are not thinking clearly when they need a locksmith or a plumber. They are locked out, water is leaking, something broke, and they just want somebody nearby who can fix it. So they open Google, tap one of the first businesses that comes up, and assume the listing is real. Unfortunately, that is exactly the kind of situation scammers count on.

In this episode, Mike Blumenthal, co-founder and analyst at Near Media, talks about fake local business listings and the ways bad actors have learned to game Google Maps. Mike has been following this problem for years, going back to the early days of map spam, when locksmiths were creating fake listings all over major cities. We learn how listings can look legitimate with complete addresses, phone numbers, and reviews without actually existing.

We also talk about what regular people can actually do about it. Mike explains why it helps to keep a short list of trusted local businesses before an emergency happens, and what to watch for if you do have to search online at the moment. A generic phone greeting, mismatched company names, fake-looking reviews, or an unmarked truck can all be warning signs.

Show Notes:

• [1:08] Mike Blumenthal shares how losing his family business led him into SEO, local search, and eventually years of work focused on Google Maps and local digital marketing.
• [3:47] Early Google Maps abuse showed up in a big way when locksmiths created thousands of fake listings across Manhattan to capture emergency service calls.
• [6:28] Fake listings can work especially well on mobile because Google’s local results often favor businesses that appear to be physically close to the person searching.
• [9:13] Map spam creates real harm for legitimate businesses and consumers, including in a recent plumbing case tied to millions of dollars in alleged consumer losses.
• [12:04] Consumers can protect themselves by checking more than one platform, looking for consistent branding, and being cautious when hiring emergency service providers.
• [15:22] Reports can be made to Google, the FTC, or state attorneys general, but fake listing problems are not always fixed quickly or easily.
• [18:46] The Premier Plumbing case shows how troubling the problem still is, with thousands of fake listings allegedly created despite years of known abuse in local search.
• [21:37] Real local businesses should not depend entirely on Google and need to build direct customer relationships through email, text, repeat service, and trust.
• [24:42] Small customer service details, from professional arrival to respecting someone’s home, can make a major difference in whether people trust and recommend a business.
• [28:04] Pressure-based reviews can mislead consumers, especially when customers feel pushed to leave positive feedback or mention specific employees by name.
• [31:24] Review volume alone does not prove a business is trustworthy because reviews can be fake, pressured, incentivized, or difficult to judge at a glance.
• [33:19] Stressful emergencies make people more vulnerable to scams because they are trying to solve an urgent problem quickly and may not stop to verify the business.

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review. 

Links and Resources:

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• Mike Blumenthal
• Near Media

Transcript:

Mike, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate being here, Chris.

Can you give myself and the audience a little bit of background about who you are and what you do?

Sure. I grew up in rural western New York. I worked in a family business till I was 50, at which point $5 million business that my father and grandfather created went broke. This was 2001, due to burgeoning internet, Amazon, B&H Photo, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Prior to that, I'd started developing a not-for-profit content management system, open source, that we started building.

I went full-time on the internet in 2001, realized we needed marketing, developed some SEO skills in the early 2000s, and then started following local in 2004, 2005 because I lived in a very rural area and to get 250,000 population, I needed nine Yellow Page books. When Google came out with local, I joyously threw away my Yellow Page books, satisfying this deep-seated resentment I had against Yellow Page salesmen at the time, who sold using FUD. If you're not familiar with that term: fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

It was very joyous occasion for me. In 2006, I started writing a blog and I wondered why nobody else was writing about local at the time. I didn't make my first dollar in local until 2010, 2011 when I started training, but I wrote about it passionately and continue to do so.

Local is one of those interesting things. Let me digress for a second. Anyone who's listening probably has no clue what a Yellow Pages is unless they're our age. When you refer to local, you're referring to local search, correct?

Local digital marketing, the broad world of search ads, social video now ticked out. Whatever can create an opportunity for business, whatever can build a brand for local business, whatever can generate traffic for local business digitally, is what I call local. It's a broader definition, but historically, it's been local search and historically, for the last 10 years, local search on Google. Prior to that, there were some competitors, but not for the last 10 years.

Yeah, there's no competitors other than Google. Well, I suppose Yelp and things like that.

Let's talk about the weird things that have happened in local, both on maps and in the search results. I know you had done some writing a number of years ago about things that you have found. Let's talk about some of those.

Are you talking specifically about abuses?

Yes.

OK. I think the first large-scale abuse I discovered was 2008, when locksmiths, many of them having one location, generated thousands and thousands of fake listings on Google Maps. I have a famous screenshot from 2008 where Manhattan looks like it has the measles, and many of you probably don't even know what measles are or chickenpox maybe, but little red dots over your face. It was chickenpox, and Manhattan looked like that.

There were dots, three dots, there were four or five, six dots to every block throughout the whole borough of Manhattan. Clearly, they had figured out that Google local and Google Maps was generating leads, and they wanted to be there. That was the first case. Subsequent to that, we've seen hijacked listings and hotels where people would insert their phone number into hotel listings to make the commission on the hotel room booking.

Most recently, the DOJ—this is just last month—filed a suit against Premier Plumbing in Illinois, where they're accused of having 15,000 fake Google locations with fake reviews. I mean, fake reviews and fake locations often go hand-in-hand. Because reviews impact rank, spammers are quick to get good reviews for their fake listings. But we also see it not just in criminal environments, but we see it in lead gen environments, which are, I guess, criminal in a sense, but not as criminal.

They're not out to deceive people. The original locksmiths often did this bait-and-switch where—and some of the scammers still do this—where they'll get to your home, they think it's an $80 bill to fix the lock, and they break the lock, and it's a $500 bill. Otherwise, your front door doesn't lock. Those scams are still occurring, but sometimes it's just lead gen.

Let's talk about why they're doing this. Are they doing it because when people are looking, let's just use the locksmith example of, “I'm looking for a locksmith. I just want to find the guy that's nearest me.” And therefore, if there's a location, whether it's real or fake, if there's a locksmith who claims to be just down the street, human nature is, “That’s the guy I want to use.”

Yeah, and obviously they can include pictures and other selling points, but historically, at least for the last 11 years, the Google local algorithm, depending on the volume of locations, was very geography-constrained. Even if you, since you have it on the phone, even if you just ask for locksmith, you didn't even have to add near me, Google would, if there were enough listings, Google would show it in a very small area.

A couple of, maybe a mile, maybe two, depending on the number of businesses that met that criteria. Obviously, the more locations you have, the more likelihood you have of being found, particularly with the advent of mobile, where Google constrained the geography even more.

And so were they using fake addresses, real addresses, but just claiming to be there, people's home?

All the above. I mean, Google was very conflicted in the early days of 2007, 2008, whether they should allow businesses that were service-area only didn't have addresses. But clearly, they thought that for Google, having more businesses was better because it theoretically satisfied consumer demand, but also gave them more businesses they could pitch AdWords to.

Google has had this sort of mixed attitude towards service area businesses, and had imprecise verification methodologies that would allow businesses to claim initially, for example, you could do it at a PO box, or then you could do it at a UPS store or whatever. Some of those have failed, but now they use second stories of commercial buildings in Toronto, where the landlord is perfectly happy forwarding the mail.

It's a little bit of everything. Whatever these people can figure out how to get by Google, they try to get by Google. Now, in the last two years, Google has switched from postcard verification, which was fairly trivial to scam, to video verification, which usually means you need to be on site.

But apparently, last year, Google sued somebody for having a set that they would move around from location to location, and they would show how they were a locksmith at that location. Google actually sued them. So still, it's possible, and we saw with, like I said, the Premier Plumbing case, possible to generate 15,000 locations.

Clearly, it must, let's not ever, carefully how it fares for real business, like where there actually is a real business, clearly, it actually well, does it actually work in that? In that sense, I should say clearly, it works just because people try to do messy things. It doesn't necessarily mean it actually gets them customers.

Well, I mean, are you asking me if spam hurts real businesses? I mean, it certainly does.

We know spam hurts real businesses, do you know if it was significantly benefiting those that were doing the listing spamming?

One presumes so. And in the case of the recent DOJ case I just mentioned, they claimed $79 million in consumer losses, which equates to $79 million of business gain. Clearly, they were benefiting. Now, Google has, over the last three years, attempted to make it harder and slower for a business to achieve takeoff with fake listings.

For example, now, if a fake listing is created, it may not be able to get reviews for several months because that delay increases the cost to the business because they can't really rank, so they're not getting benefit from it. Google has attempted to put in place things that slow the process down. But because they do their assessment algorithmically to a large extent and aren't willing to put humans on it, the problem still persists and will persist. Google will play whack-a-mole and tell you how great they are.

What are the risks to the consumer in these sort of things? And how would they know whether it's a real listing or a spammy listing?

Well, Google has what is called distressed categories. These are categories that usually involve home services, and where the consumer might be at physical risk by having somebody into their home. In terms of being able to tell, the first defense is to keep a good Rolodex of your favorite plumber, your favorite roofer, your favorite garage door opener, and your favorite water cleanup expert—any of the home services businesses—duct cleaning, AC repair.

Find somebody that's good and hang onto them for the rest of your life, not use Google to find them. If you do have to use Google to find them, check to see if they are in the Better Business Bureau and whether they have their legitimate, not just listed with Better Business Bureau, but a member. That's one test. The other is reviews, but reviews can be fake.

And with AI, fake reviews have become very believable. Consumers actually like AI-written reviews more than they like human-written reviews. It's very difficult to tell. But if you call and they answer with a generic name, in other words, you're looking for Joe's Plumbing and they answer “plumbing,” there's a clear indicator that they don't know which listing it's coming from, and it's fake. There's that. You can do a search around the web.

I mean, most legitimate businesses that have been in business for a while have reviews at multiple places. That's not a guarantee. It's a risky business out there. I mean, I would recommend that people not use Google to find a plumber. There's a safe bet.

For those sort of emergency services where something has happened in the middle of the night, there's a water leak, the door broke, the door lock broke, the garage door broke, they need a tow truck, what would be the—where would you recommend people go for those resources if they don't already have it in their Rolodex?

Right. Apple, which uses third parties that do a little more validation. For example, Yelp does more validation than Google. Both require addresses so they're not addressed entities. May or may not service them. But I mean, Google probably has the best database of good listings. But the problem is it's hard to tell when a listing is real and when it's fake. You just have to be very cautious.

I mean, one, you want to be looking at photos to make sure that the photos show branded trucks and uniformed employees. And when they arrive at your house, they are uniformed and in a branded truck. Because the way some of these scams work is the person selling the lead doesn't even know who they're sending so that it can't be branded.

If you are forced to use Google, then I would demand, one, that everything matches up. Two, you've looked at reviews around the net, not just at Google. And three, that you insist on uniformed employees, brand on their trucks, and it all matches so that you can validate when they come to your home that they are who they say they are.

I guess that's probably a good rule of thumb, even outside of whether you think it's a real listing, a fake listing, a lead gen. If you call Joe the plumber, “I have to come out.” If the guy shows up with Express Plumber logo on the outside of his truck, that should be a, “I didn't call Express Plumber; who are you and why are you here?”

Exactly. And Google, in their recommendations in speaking with Google, they often recommend that you have customer journey photos on your home service business as validation so that a customer can know what to expect from your company, and then you deliver at least that pre-sale experience with brand, decent uniforms, and branded trucks.

I would assume that these days with AI, one of the challenges with Google or any platform providing guidance on, “Here's how to make your listing stand out,” you just tell the bad people, “Here's how to make your listing look real.”

There are dark networks where people share this information broadly. There are people who readily experiment and then sell that knowledge. I don't think it matters whether Google says it or not. I mean, that information, assuming there's enough economic gain, is going to be sold for profit and leveraged for profit.

And currently, the way Google works is it's easy enough to get a fake listing that people are doing it for profit. Whether Google tells you what a good listing looks like or not, the reality is that information is out on the net. And Google's system is inadequate to protect against it, has remained inadequate since day one.

In my mind, it is a defective product that allows scammers and spammers to be included all too much. I am on a high horse trying to convince some business that is harmed by this to sue Google on the defective product theory of legal theory rather than facing section 230, try to sidestep section 230, which protects Google categorically against abuses of their platform. But it doesn't protect them if the platform is defective, and I think it is.

If we have the businesses can go after, there's access to the businesses that they'd be taking advantage of, they can do. Do you know if there's any consumer advocacy groups?

You can report these abuses to Google. It feels like a dark light. You can report them to the FTC. You can report them to your attorney general. If there are enough reports, these organizations will act. Even the business suing Google is a very long-shot lawsuit. Certainly, unless you have a lot of passion and deep pockets, I wouldn't encourage it, because they're going to throw every lawyer they have at it and every dollar.

The same avenues are open to the business. I think in the case of the business and the consumer, publicity makes a big difference. Google has literally a system that tracks bad publicity. When the publicity gets loud enough, they fix the problem, at least your problem, temporarily. You might get some short-term relief.

Assuming the best of any entity, let's assume that they really are trying to fix it. There are just the people that are trying to abuse platforms. “You fixed that bug, but I know of 16 other ones that I'm going to take advantage of.” Or we've seen that with even just email spam over the years. It used to be don't include the word “free.” These sort of things that used to catch spam filters.

The email problem largely comes from a design of email that didn't anticipate abuse. It allowed abuse. I think the same is actually true with Google. Although they have the resources to manage it, they could put humans on it for better moderation. They could build a tighter system.

Yes, spammers continue to push these levers and buttons. But to me, I'm incredulous still that a business like Premier Plumbing could create 15,000 fake listings and steal $70 million to $79 million from consumers in today's day and age after 15, 20 years of these abuses. You would think that Google would have fixed it a little better than that.

Speaking of the Premier case, do you know how quickly those—what time frame did it take for those listings to start showing up, do you know?

Yeah, I don't know the history of listings. Well, we started seeing reports on the web from competitors who were being injured by them starting in 2022. Those accelerated till 2025, where we started seeing news reports in Minneapolis and Minnesota, where a lot of these locations were. Then shortly after that, the Minnesota 8 attorney general and the FTC got involved. The FTC found enough volume of abuse and scale of abuse they referred to the DOJ. Sometime between 2022 and 2025 is the likely time frame. It might have started before 2022.

Yeah, to me, not knowing what goes on inside any large organization like Google, it would seem to me that if an extra 10,000 plumbers showed up or 10,000 locksmiths or 10,000 plumbers showed up, that alone would seem suspicious. Why is there suddenly, “There's only ever been 16 plumbers in my city. Why are there now 40 of them?”

Historically, the reason is that Google looks at their data set globally. There's churches and restaurants and brick-and-mortar stores that don't change very often. They come and they go at a fairly low volume. When you assume that there's 250 million businesses globally and 10,000 get added, that's a very small percentage when you're looking at it globally.

But you're right. They should be looking not globally but locally for exceptions where large scale is occurring. I mean, to mirror their search algorithm, the spam algorithm should be looking locally for large scale within distressed categories like the home services and responding there. Now, we know that they have implemented something like that in reviews.

If you create a new business and you’re in a distressed category, your reviews are much more likely to be filtered for the first six or nine months of your existence more aggressively than if you'd opened a brick-and-mortar shop where they can vet the reality a little better.

That's a little bit of challenge for a new business in a sense. If I am a legitimate plumber, I just got my contractor's license, I just finished my apprenticeship, I'm really excited about the plumbing work that I've done. I'm going to become a plumber and hang my shingle. And all of a sudden, I'm getting business, but none of my reviews are getting published. That would be really annoying.

It would be very annoying. I would say to that plumber, you should look at Google as gravy on the top of the potatoes, but you should make your own potatoes. Realistically, Google is not a trustworthy business partner. And while they can generate leads for you, and I would encourage you to do well there, I think you need a system that functions outside of large oligarchic control.

And for me, that's text and email, where with every customer, you get their email address. You follow up with them periodically just to let them know you're still alive with a nice newsletter. Maybe you have some openings in your schedule because it's fall and people aren't, whatever. You let your customers know so that you can build a business generation system that exists outside of Google.

Then you're asking these same customers for reviews. You do well on Google, because over that nine months, 10 months later, when you start getting more reviews, you do well, where Google then becomes just complementary to a system that doesn't need Google to exist. You can't predicate the success and failure of your business on a large, untrustworthy partner.

Yeah, because you don't know if they're going to change. We were talking SEO earlier.

You're a good example. You don't know when they're going to change.

If the algorithm changes, if you live by the algorithm, you potentially die by the algorithm, whether it's Google or Bing or any. If 90% of your business comes from Yelp and Yelp changes their algorithm, then you're at risk.

There are no silver bullets. It's hard to build a business. But people want real, authentic experiences, where it's not just operationally efficient. It's operationally pleasant, where every time you touch a customer, they experience joy, or at least they don't experience pain. That's how the type of operation of business needs to run to succeed in today's world, so that the person-to-person reality is positive.

That will then be reflected on the internet over time, rather than trying to reflect a false impression of your business immediately on the internet and not servicing those people with a kind of…. I think about people coming to my house. And all too frequently, they traipse through my laundry room. They go down to the basement to fix it.

They leave a trail of mud through the laundry room. It's like, “OK, they did a great job fixing it, but they didn't have to leave that mud. They could have put booties on. They could have put a carpet down. There's a million things they could have done.” I think every business needs to explore every point to interact with a client and make sure that it's at the highest level of operational effectiveness it can be. It's not just cost-effective for you, but pleasant for the client. And then over time, you build that into your systems. Every new person gets trained in that. And you can see that reflected in your reviews.

There was an air conditioning company that I was dealing with, and they had an air conditioning nightmare, and one company just couldn't solve the problem. We ended up calling another company. The customer service experience and the professionalism of the companies were very much night and day. The second company was, like with any service business, “We're going to give you a window for the arrival because we don't know how long any other job is going to take.”

We might get this two-, three-hour window. The day of the appointment, they texted and said, “Just a reminder that we'll have a tech out in this window. We will let you know when they're on the way.” Later on in the day, I get a text message. And it's, “Hey, Bob is on his way. He's just finished his last job. He'll be there within a half an hour. Here's a picture of Bob. That way, you know what Bob looks like.”

That's what I call operational excellence, at least in the presale segment. You have to realize that a complete customer interaction starts with maybe with Google. You have to show the same picture of Bob on the website. It starts with Google and the reviews there. But it also then is from how they handled your call, how they got you the quote, how they get the person in your house.

Then what happens when they're there? Do they solve the problem efficiently? Is the bill consistent with what they've said? And do they not leave a muddy track in your laundry room? Then post-sale, do they treat you with respect and kindness and don't punish you if you don't leave a review, whatever? Or don't harangue you to leave a review, but maybe politely ask. Or there's this whole cycle.

You then move into their marketing cycle with some amount of acceptance and joy. They send you a nice newsletter about how you need to clean the filter on your furnace in a timely fashion. Yeah, you forgot to clean it this far. You better get down there and clean the filter, replace those kinds of things. And then that gives your business a trusted avenue into that customer forever.

And it's challenging, because I think you can have situations where a company—let’s say that they're not AI-generated reviews. They're real reviews. They are real reviews from real customers, but the customers have put them under duress. There was a moving company that I had used. Part of the reason why I chose them was like, “Oh, my goodness, they have a ton of reviews.” They came out. They did their job. They didn't do anything crazy.

Everything went perfectly well. But at the end, “I'm afraid that if I don't get a good review, I might lose my job. I need you to leave a positive review and mention me and the other guys on the team. I really need you to do that.” The pressure to leave a review was crazy. I was like, “Oh, now I know why you had so many reviews, because the pressure.” All the reviews were legitimate customers.

Not legitimate reviews in that they were under duress.

Correct.

That is now against FTC guidelines and Google guidelines. But Google can't always tell. They are now punishing. If you're in one of these distressed industries, you get a lot of reviews with employee names. Those reviews will be taken down. But a lot of small businesses don't even realize that not only is pressure against guidelines and against the law, but incentives are also against guidelines and against the law if the incentive isn't mentioned in the review.

If I'm doing a review and I'm publishing on my website, I can give you an incentive to leave that review. Or I can give you an incentive to give me your email so I can contact you for the review. But if I'm getting a review at Google, I can't incentivize that within the constraints of the law. And most small businesses don't realize. They think, “Oh, it's OK.” It isn't because it creates this undue, unfair reality. And you also, likewise, it's against the law to ask your wife and family members and management partners to leave you a review as well.

Don't review your own business. Although, very much, I see that with restaurant openings. There's always the soft opening. We invite all the people that leave really good reviews for restaurants when we have a soft opening.

Yes.

I feel bad for the consumer. You live and breathe this stuff and seeing this. The consumer is gleefully unaware of all this stuff when it comes to business listings, other than verifying it on multiple platforms. I assume if there was an easy way to spot these things, they would be suspicious of clearly the one that just says, “Thanks for calling the plumber,” instead of “Joe's Plumber.”

One way, and AI does offer a possible solution to this, is that you can now go into Ask Maps, which is Google's new Maps AI feature, or in AI overviews or AI mode. You can say to it, “Compare the good and bad experiences that consumers have expressed about these three businesses,” and it will then list out a summary of the negatives.

Depending on your predilection, you can see what was negative about the experiences. More easily, in your moving company's case, I'm sure that even though they had 3,000 reviews, there were probably 100 bad reviews in there. They didn't have much impact on the star rating. But if you looked at those reviews in aggregate, which is sort of hard to do manually, because you've got to click in three clicks, but AI gives you a way to do that.

You can say, “Summarize these and tell me what the negative opinions were of people and how do they stack up against this company for those negative things.” You do have a little bit of an automated solution. You see this on Amazon. They're actually auto-generating some of these negative review summaries. Google does to a lesser extent. But the AI can give you exactly what you're looking for.

Let's say the first company you dealt with, if they consistently left tracks across your room, AI may have hints of that and you can find it. Pick out what's important to you. Ask AI if these companies experience that, or to summarize the negatives.

I suppose in my moving company experience, if I had AI summaries, I'm sure there are multiple reviews that would have commented on, “So I got a lot of pressure to leave a review about it.” Which should be a red flag. As a consumer, it would be like, “Oh, OK. The reason why there's so many reviews is because they're pestering and annoying people. OK, so there's something fishy with the reviews. I really need to take the volume of reviews and the content of the reviews with a grain of salt.”

Exactly.

That's kind of a neat way to look at it. I suppose if you're using AI, you could also say, “I only want to deal with companies that have been in business three years that have a brick-and-mortar location.

“Don't have any reports of this problem, this problem, or this problem, but that have an expertise in this area because I have a unique setup.” I mean, AI allows you to ask these multifaceted queries and will then do what's called fan-out queries, find the two or three or four businesses that meet that criteria. I mean, I think it's one of the good things about Ask Maps and AI views that you can do these much more complicated comparisons.

But you still have to realize that there's a lot of data in there that the AI may misinterpret because it's fake data, either through it was given under duress or maybe there were incentives paid. Just keep your eyes open.

It's buyer beware. And typical with anything that's even scam related. When the plumbing is broke, the air conditioner has broken, the front door lock is broken, we're in an emotional state. The chances of us being taken advantage of go up significantly because of that emotion.

Exactly.

And so, Mike, if people want to learn more about you and what you do, where can they find you online?

Well, let's see. I am a product expert on Google's Google My Business Forum. You can find me there. But I currently work at nearmedia.co. We have a free newsletter for lawyers and a free newsletter for businesses around local. We have a weekly podcast so it all can be subscribed to for free. I'm also on Twitter and LinkedIn, @mblumenthal, and/or Mike Blumenthal on LinkedIn.

My email, I have an open email policy. If you have a question about this topic or related topics, I'm available and we'll try to answer it. [email protected], [email protected]. I will try to answer your question.

And what's the name of the podcast so we can include it?

Near Memo.

Near Memo. Also, we will make sure to include links to all those in the show notes. Mike, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Well, it's a real pleasure. It's a pleasure meeting you and a pleasure being on your podcast.