Google Sued G Verifier Scammers Who Posed as Company Representatives

Daniel ZimmermannDecember 1, 2022

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Google has filed a lawsuit against G Verifier scammers who posed as Google representatives and scammed users of money, allegedly for promoting business profiles in Google Search and Maps. Scammers also traded reviews (both positive and negative), which allowed them to manipulate the ratings of companies.

Let me remind you that we also talked about the fact that Google Claims RCS Lab Hacking Tools Are Being Used to Target iOS and Android Users.

Edition The Record says that the reason for going to court was the receipt of dozens of complaints from users who reported that they were deceived by a company called G Verifier. Users reported that scammers demanded money from them to create or “verify” business profiles, which Google provides for free.

In many of the complaints, victims report that they received a call from G Verifier saying that they must pay $99 or else their account will be suspended and the company cannot be found using Google services.

When one of the victims tried to protest to the scammers that Google services are free, they said that the conditions have changed, the services were free before, and now Google is re-verifying companies, making sure that they are still working in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other victims were told they would lose their five-star rating if they didn’t pay. In other cases, the scammers even offered (for a fee) to fill the company profile with fake positive reviews.

The scammers have also set up sites that advertise buying fake reviews (both positive and negative) to manipulate reviews on business profiles on Google Search and Maps. This practice was aimed at small and medium businesses and violated our content policy.said Google lawyer Jon Vermandel and head of technical programs Ian Williams.

Vermandel and Williams say that in 2021, the company stopped more than 12 million attempts to create fake company profiles and almost 8 million attempts to take someone else’s profiles.

Google’s lawsuit alleges that G Verifier is based in Columbus, Ohio and is run by a man named Kaushal Patel. Patel is now accused of opening other shell companies to carry out this scam. The lawsuit also accuses the scammers of copyright infringement (misuse of the Google logo and other branding “to legitimize fraudulent businesses”), false advertising, telemarketing fraud and deceptive trade practices.

Google and G Verifier
G Verifier Logos

It is reported that Patel and other scammers carried out their operations through the sites gverifiers[.]com and gverifierpro[.]com.

Since during the calls, the scammers told the victims that they could increase their search rankings if they were paid, Google representatives emphasize:

These claims, which promised higher rankings in organic search results, are false and misleading. No service can guarantee that the Google search engine, which uses a complex algorithm, will place a particular web page on the first page of results, much less that it will be the very first result.

It should be noted that this is not the first time that Google is suing fraudsters. For example, it recently became known that the company won a lawsuit against the operators of the Glupteba botnet.

Also the media said that Google Blocked Dozens of Domains Owned by Hacker Mercenaries.

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