Claiming your listing does not let you lock it in the sense you are thinking of. It's also not very difficult to claim a listing that was already claimed by somebody else -- they will get an email asking them to challenge your claim, and if they don't respond you can take over the listing. That's how it worked a year ago, which is the last time I used it.

You can review edits in Google My Business. But Google will sometimes import a bunch of data from a data broker or some other source and bulk update your listings, which you then need to go in and edit again.

Google My Business is also very, very strict about rejecting addresses it does not think are real, which is a bit of a problem for businesses on newly constructed roads, or roads that were recently renamed. If their address normalizer rejects it, you just can't use it.

When you have a problem, Google's customer service is really, really bad.

This could explain why the scammers were able to claim the bank listings. The two banks mentioned in the article are nationalised(govt) banks, notorious for unprofessional work-culture. (I have an account at SBI) I wouldn't be surprised if the emails from Google went to black hole email addresses, giving scammers ownership of the listings.

On the contrary, if someone claims your business, it's extremely difficult to undo. My mother has this issue with her 1 person LLC - some random person claimed it, and the reclaiming flow was busted last I checked

When I did this a long time ago, I received a postcard to the address on the website, contain a PIN code that I needed to input on line. Don't they do that any more?

Not sure, the issue I hit was that it was legitimately broken when I tried. 500 responses or some such from an API call

Could you change the address (as described in this article) then claim it?

I recently changed a major shopping centre in my state from "Foo Market - The Shopping Capital" to "Foo Market" and 48h later it was approved. I'm not sure which one google would consider more correct and would assume changing a phone number might go through a few more checks but it was surprising.

Also reminds me about the taxi lost and found issue [1].

[1] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/76-lost-in-a-cab

Really all they do is ask a group of local guides if the title is correct. If a certain threshold say yes the change applies. I’m sure they have some other filters in place though.

I had randomly received a bunch of postcards for incorrect google maps address confirmations recently at my office. Made me stop for a sec and think about how that system works, and the why/ who would try to send out fake requests.