John Paul M. Joaquin Tech 06.16.2023 09:Jun AM EDT

Google Files Lawsuit Against Fake Review Scammer for Deceiving Consumers

Google has had enough of one alleged scammer.

The search giant recently filed a consumer protection lawsuit against a bad actor that tried to manipulate its services to deceive consumers and business owners in a coordinated campaign.

The lawsuit follows Google's attempts to repel competition from a new breed of competitors in the form of AI-assisted Bing and ChatGPT services, along with potentially numerous low-quality AI-generated search results, per The Verge.

Google Consumer Protection Lawsuit Details

Google's head of litigation, Renny Hwang, mentioned in a blog post that Google filed a consumer protection lawsuit targeting an alleged scammer to help put an end to their fraudulent schemes.

According to the lawsuit Google filed, the company is suing one Ethan QiQi Hu and two companies: GMBEye, a business entity of unknown form, Rafadigital, a limited liability company from Mississippi, and around 20 unnamed co-defendants. The company claims that they coordinated a campaign to deceive consumers and business owners by fraudulently attempting to manipulate its services for small businesses.

To do so, Hu and the companies involved created more than 350 fake Business Profiles listings since mid-2021 and tried to bolster them with more than 14,000 fake reviews from people who didn't exist. Google claims the defendants used props to pass off their phony listings as real small businesses to verify their fraudulent listings.

However, the company eventually detected over a hundred fraudulent revisions to the fake Business Profiles content, which the defendants allegedly did by changing their Business Profile into a completely different one from the one they verified.

For instance, they created and verified a Business Profile for "Baltimore Spa Paradise," a nonexistent massage spa in Baltimore, Maryland, and changed it to "1st Painters in Baltimore" - an entirely new business - 30 days later verification.

Additionally, the defendants sold and rented the fake listings they made to GMBEye's clients and other parties by other means, such as Facebook pages, to help them promote their own services in Google's search results. In one example, Hu allegedly asked potential buyers for $1,000 for access to a fake plumbing listing for a "Plumbing GMB + Website" in Monterey, California, that received around 40 calls and 5 form submissions the month before - calls which likely came from people in the area looking for a plumber.

The callers would then be routed through that fake listing to a real but different plumbing business with a less sophisticated online footprint, per The Verge.

Google's Prayer

Google is asking the US District Court in the Northern District of California for them to be awarded damages "in an amount sufficient to compensate it for damages Hu and the companies involved in the campaign, caused, though it didn't specify the amount the defendants have to pay for it to be fully compensated in its lawsuit.

It also asked the court to ban the defendants from advertising or selling false verification services along with other compensation the court deems reasonable.

"Customers trust Google to provide authoritative and reliable results," Hwang said. "But that trust is lost if they spend money based on fake reviews... We'll continue to prioritize trust and safety for both businesses and consumers through proactive litigation and investing in technology to ensure information across our platforms is reliable."