I don't believe this is google just because of all the manual labor involved. Google would scrape the whole site and call people with pre-recorded messages or something. The operation would be fully automated. I actually don't have any opinion wether they would do it or not, but I doubt manual labor would be involved if that was the case.
No, the reason it's not a sanctioned Google business process - amongst any other number of reasons - but the one that is important is that there is NO GOOGLE SIZED REVENUE in scamming small Kenyan businesses, and there is a huge huge PR downside.
Whether it's the work of rogue employees or a third party, we'll see.
I agree. Google is not dumb enough to do this. Talk about no upside and all downside! Risking your reputation for the equivalent of a few pennies is ridiculous. Scamming African small businesses, of all things, that's making money the hard way.
Totally agree, I just don't see why on earth Google would want to do something like this with the ability for such awful backlash in exchange for what I think would be minimal bump in profit for a company like them.
I'm not commenting one way or another on the overall story, but when I read (paraphrasing) "tried to upsell a domain name" I got very suspicious. Domain names are pretty near zero-margin... unless you're scamming uneducated and unconnected small business owners by charging them way more than they cost.
I don't believe this is google just because of all the manual labor involved. Google would scrape the whole site and call people with pre-recorded messages or something.
for what it's worth, after i moved, google maps still showed that my old address was where my business was located. i filled out a short form saying it was not accurate any longer. there was no other contact information on the form, so i could have been anyone telling google a business had moved.
about a week later i received a call at my business number from an indian-sounding man asking if my company was no longer at my previous address. i could barely understand him, but he didn't say he was with google and once i confirmed that my business had moved, he hung up. shortly after that, my company was taken off of google maps.
so google is using manual labor, and they had to have done at least enough research to get my business phone number.
