Thanks for covering this hijacking issue. It truly can happen anywhere and if you follow the activity of the Google user IDs involved in the florist hijackings, you’ll see the same group also snatched listings of furniture stores, banks, salons, restaurants and martial arts studios.

The little bit of light is that I noticed an ‘angel’ or two out and about correcting the hijacks. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough angels to counterbalance the spammers.

Mike’s absolutely right. This hand-crafted spam can only be stopped by real human intervention. Most SMBs are busy running their companies and don’t even know where to start when it comes to spotting, let alone fixing mapspam.

Cathy

Thanks for the nod.

Listing Hijacking not only could be happening in other industries it has been happening in other industries. I first reported on this in May of this year.

It was predictable when the feature was introduced and abused have been reported for months ago, yet Google remained in a reactive mode as far as edits of business records went. Not only have they not put in place the human oversight necessary they have not put in place the technical oversight either to guarantee listing accuracy.

Any security system that relies on the intelligence and knowledge of 12-16 million small businesses to be secure (ie logging into the LBC) is not very secure, is it? Shame on Google.

Mike
PS I will do the rant for you