Google abolishes over fake business profiles and user accounts from Google Maps
Google declares to have taken down more than 3 million fake business profiles from Google Maps in 2018. It claims the facts through a blog post describing the ways in which they tackle these fake business profiles. The blog post was in response to a study published by the Wall Street Journal claiming that Google Maps had a large number of false listings, amounting to about 11 million.
In 2017, Google conducted a self-funded study, where it was claimed that only 0.5% of the Google Searches were false listings. But the Wall Street Journal study depicted that 13 of the top 20 Google searches were false listings. Moreover, there were only two real businesses which adhered to Google guidelines.
Basically, the scammers are behind the fake business profiles. They charge different businesses for services which are actually free. Furthermore, they defraud customers by posing as real established businesses. To deal with them, Google has been using many different techniques. But the scammers manage to come back with different techniques.
Google proclaims that it has achieved significant success against such practices. Moreover, 90% of these profiles were removed even before a user was able to see it. Out of all these removals, their internal systems were responsible for 85% of them. Even Google Maps users contributed to this fake removal. Over 250,000 such profiles were removed because they were reported by the users. Along with it, Google has also disabled about 150,000 accounts which were thought to be abusive, having a 50% increase from 2017.
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