Google Sued G Verifier Scammers Who Posed as Company Representatives

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.