'Don't Trust Google for Customer Service Numbers. It Might Be a Scam.' (msn.com) 52
Google may be the most successful company in the world. But a Washington Post reporter argues that Google "makes you largely responsible for dodging the criminals who are hurting legitimate businesses and swindling people."
On Monday, I found what appeared to be impostors of customer service for Delta and Coinbase, the cryptocurrency company, in the "People also ask" section high up in Google. A group of people experienced in Google's intricacies also said this week that it took about 22 minutes to fool Google into highlighting a bogus business phone number in a prominent spot in search results...
If you look at the two impostor phone numbers in Google for Delta and Coinbase, there are red flags. There are odd fonts and a website below the bogus numbers that wasn't for either company. (I notified Google about the apparent scams on Monday and I still saw them 24 hours later.) The correct customer help numbers did appear at the very top, and Google says businesses have clear instructions to make their customer service information visible to people searching Google.
The larger issue is "a persistent pattern of bad guys finding ways to trick Google into showing scammers' numbers for airlines, hotels, local repair companies, banks or other businesses." The toll can be devastating when people are duped by these bogus business numbers. Fortune recently reported on a man who called what a Google listing said was Coinbase customer support, and instead it was an impostor who Fortune said tricked the man and stole $100,000...
Most of the time, you will find correct customer service numbers by Googling. But the company doesn't say how often people are tricked out of time and money by bogus listings — nor why Google can't stop the scams from recurring.
The article makes two points.
If you look at the two impostor phone numbers in Google for Delta and Coinbase, there are red flags. There are odd fonts and a website below the bogus numbers that wasn't for either company. (I notified Google about the apparent scams on Monday and I still saw them 24 hours later.) The correct customer help numbers did appear at the very top, and Google says businesses have clear instructions to make their customer service information visible to people searching Google.
The larger issue is "a persistent pattern of bad guys finding ways to trick Google into showing scammers' numbers for airlines, hotels, local repair companies, banks or other businesses." The toll can be devastating when people are duped by these bogus business numbers. Fortune recently reported on a man who called what a Google listing said was Coinbase customer support, and instead it was an impostor who Fortune said tricked the man and stole $100,000...
Most of the time, you will find correct customer service numbers by Googling. But the company doesn't say how often people are tricked out of time and money by bogus listings — nor why Google can't stop the scams from recurring.
The article makes two points.
- Google says when they identify listings violating their rules, they move quickly against them.
- "Impostor numbers pop up so persistently that I am once again begging you to be wary of Google or Google Maps listings for business phone numbers... You still might see bogus phone numbers in some spots in Google. And if you're stressed trying to find help with a flight or a financial problem, you might overlook warning signs. Scams work because humans make errors in judgment, especially when we're confused or panicky. And business impostors aren't always obvious."
Google has no phone numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Try to phone google about scams in the first place.
Re:Google has no phone numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook is the same, if not worse.
Scam ads run rampant on Facebook, to the point where, after many months of reporting them with no result, I disabled my Facebook account.
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They will pawn off Facebook to some other sucker
I hear Elon is in the market for another social media app to run into the ground..
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Facebook disables my legit accounts. :/
Re:Google has no phone numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Try to phone google about scams in the first place.
Which is probably representative of the main source of the problem.
It's not like most of these companies want you to call them - not on their support lines vs. their sales lines, anyway.
Hide your support phone numbers, or make them obscure, and of course it will be easier for someone else to pretend "hey, I got that support number right here!"
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Luckily, I detected it quickly and Delta was able to restore my lost SkyMiles that were siphoned off.
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We really need a law requiring anyone selling a product or service to make themselves directly available to customers in a real-time, interactive manner with a human being. I don't care if I have to sit on hold for 20 min but I want a person eventually.
Same goes for airline phone numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
A search engine (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A search engine (Score:5, Insightful)
That works for people with a clue. About 20% of the population (max) qualify and even they make the occasional mistake. For the rest, product safety is necessary or the cost for society raises. There is a reason, for example, electrical appliances have to be safe, including fuses, overheat protection, non-flammable materials, etc. You could just, e.g., print in the manual "fuse: 3A, operating temperature 25C, made from flammable materials" and a qualified expert could still operate it safely. For the rest of the population, buildings will burn and people will die.
One reason the IT monsters got so big is by shirking all product safety and liability and putting the cost on society. That has to stop.
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You do not get rich by having a good product (Score:4, Insightful)
You get rich by having a somewhat acceptable product, pushing it aggressively, but putting the cost of all its negative sides on society. Works every time, not just for Google or in the INternet space.
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You also get richer by not supporting your product/service or doing the bare minimum. Try getting support from a gaming company.
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Indeed.
The usual, but what do you do? (Score:4)
For techies, this is obvious: You go to the actual website of the company, to get their phone number. For "Joe Sixpack", this is not obvious at all. Why wouldn't you trust Google? How many naive users think that Google search is the gateway to the Internet?
The question is: what can anyone do about this? Google indexes billions of web-pages - they must have an automated scraping process. Bad actors can and will find ways to abuse that process.
Re:The usual, but what do you do? (Score:5, Insightful)
what can anyone do about this?
Automated testing. Google can automate the query "what is support number for company X" for a few hundred popular names; and compare the result to a know-good database, or to the answer given when restricting the query to each company's domain. In case of a discrepancy, forward to a human.
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For google doing nothing also has a potential cost in liability. As someone else commented above, google is not anymore a search engine, Googe gives advice on what they think you should do. If you ask "how do I contact Delta", the answer by google is "the most effective way is through their customer support +1 (855)..." If they give scam numbers, in particular in healthcare or banking, it can backfire.
Please note that I was only answering question "what can anyone do about this". I did not intend to imply a
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"compare the result to a know-good database"
If you had a known-good database, you would just use the known-good database.
Re: The usual, but what do you do? (Score:2)
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The 90/10 rule on the internet is more like a 99.999 / 0.001 rule. Google doesn't need work with billions of web-pages, they just should flag the top 100 companies in any given area and any given country and have a manual comparison done by some labour farm in India. That would cover virtually all of this scamming since scammers rely on Imitating only the most common and wide reaching brandnames.
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Scammers also work on the long tail. They can give the same phone number for 20000 small businesses that only get one call per day but are in aggregate as big a target as a large company.
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The question is: what can anyone do about this?
i for one abstain from reading inane clickbait articles from "tech media experts", but somehow /. keeps regurgitating them for some mysterious reason.
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Ok but how do you find the company's web site and not an imposter's?
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Often companies go to great lengths to prevent people from calling them. I figure google has a good chance of stumbling upon a phone number. A garbage truck hauling away a dumpster caused some damage to my retaining wall and it was caught on video. There was no actual way to get a live person on the phone with them. I tried every possible option. Finally through the web chat a person called me back and I was able to send them the video.
probably stating the obvious, (Score:2)
but their "People Also Ask" gives a lot of wrong answers.
A lot of those are nationalistic reinterpretations of reality, but some are just wrong.
I'm sure that their use of AI will start finding the correct answers. ***not***
Two problems... (Score:2)
It's easy enough to say "if you are trying to reach Company X; don't ask Google just check Company X's site"; but then you actually visit and good goddamn luck finding a way to tal
Unnecessarily long headline (Score:2)
Only the first 3 words were needed.
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Yeah, you can't really trust Google for any business information. The hours of operation are usually wrong, the restaurant menus are out of date, and the website links are often broken.
Hell, even the GPS directions can be sketchy at times. I've been sent on unpaved service roads to get to the destination address on more than one occasion.
A simple solution is one they don't want (Score:2)
Search results (Score:2)
If you use google to look up cust support sites and such make sure you carefully read the results so you don't use a sponsored result. I have found blatant scam results from those. I report them.
Q&A sites like Quora are also poisoned (Score:2)
The folks spamming for these things create questions, answers, groups/spaces, whatever else, with their fake numbers and the names of companies in them, on Quora and other places people might go looking for answers. I usually spot them because they spam the same number for multiple competing companies, which of course makes no sense.
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Reddit still appears to have some entertainment value, but why would anyone trust anything posted there, or for that matter any random site?
Never trust the middleman! (Score:2)
Investment (Score:1)
Shorter Headline (Score:2)
You could have just shortened that sentence to, "Don't trust Google."
For about the last decade now, I've started to suspect that the internet actually is a fad that's slowly burning out.
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"the internet actually is a fad" - think of the Internet as a criminal organization and it all becomes clear.
they won't "fix" a proven marketing model (Score:2)
Of course Google won't "fix" the problem; it's a source of advertising revenue, and general boost to user engagement.
The internet is unreliable (Score:2)