Interesting. Something is up. A few more things that seemed odd:

1) It looks like most of the reviewers have only reviewed a few businesses. Maybe this is to avoid suspicion, but if the accounts are fake they seem underutilized. I didn't see any fakes with over 6.

2) On the page you linked, a several of the reviewers (Thaddues Kelly Parks, Darren Meyer, and Adilson Vierra) gave a standard glowing review but only awarded 3 stars. Also to avoid suspicion? Others gave 4.

3) All (almost all?) the fakes are within the last month. All of the extremely negative reviews are "a year ago". They are so negative I almost wonder if they might be fake too, and it might be extortion.

1. My guess is the same as yours - it’s to avoid suspicion. And maybe creating new accounts is easy enough that there’s no reason to over-use one account.

2. Yes, I imagine this is either to avoid suspicion or because the person writing/pasting this comment wasn’t paying attention and chose the wrong rating. Even fake reviews will have an error rate above 0 :-)

3. I was curious about that too. Another possibility is that the service really does suck, that’s reflected in the old negative comments, and eventually these businesses resorted to paying for reviews. All guesses though.

> 2) On the page you linked, several of the reviewers (Thaddues Kelly Parks, Darren Meyer, and Adilson Vierra) gave a standard glowing review but only awarded 3 stars. Also to avoid suspicion? Others gave 4.

The alternative explanation is: they're real people who are terrible with technology and the internet. I've run a site where people could rate their experience with others, and the correlation between stars and text was only so-so. Lots of people considered 1 to be best, even though clicking on 1 showed a text "Terrible" just below it. 3 Stars was actually pretty common for glowing reviews.

Everybody keeps forgetting that lots of people write reviews, especially when you ask them to ("hey, if you liked it here, please recommend us on Google Maps"), and some of those people will be the kind who gets these Amazon questions from other customers and reply "I'm sorry, I don't know how well they fit, I bought these pants for my son but he blew up the chicken coop and hadn't had time to wear the pants yet".

2) could be a tactic. I rarely give 5 stars (because how often does something actually 100% meet expectations?) so I assume that 5 star reviews are either:

a) scammers

b) people reviewing with zero/way too little context ("this is the BEST maternity ward in the universe!!!")

Likewise, I figure most 1 star reviews have some sort of axe to grind.

So I gravitate towards the 3 star reviews - that's where the interesting stories are.

I've seen random businesses listed appearing as a house in neighborhoods around the city before, but I always attributed them to a sole-proprietor type of business where they've listed their home address as their business address. I always thought it an odd decision, but could shrug it off as some people just are not as savvy about the implications of making those kinds of decisions.

But having it be the results of a bot farm makes sense too

I own a business in Somerset, UK. The site we are on is roughly 40% us and 60% Somerset County Council property. We each have our own UK postcode - normally reserved for around 5-80 properties.

The SCC bit has multiple uses - a transport division (minibuses for schools) and nowadays the vestiges of supported living. Its being wound down and is being sold off.

We moved to Yeovil Five Ways from near Hazlebury Plucknet (yes!) around 10 years ago. Google had no idea what was going on at this site when we moved in and I looked us up. Our bit was formally NHS - a clinic. The first thing I noticed was that their idea of the SCC "Resource Centre" was way off so I submitted a change - went through in seconds. When the eye of Sauron eventually noticed that my business had moved, it screwed up the entrance. I tried to change it. No dice.

I can make a change to a publicly owned property but not my own.

Google's insistence on hiding behind computers ("the Algorithm") needs to be challenged. It is way more important than my silly little snag. Google need to employ more people and not sack them! When an org. becomes the de facto authority on something then obviously they have developed a monopoly. Monopolies need to have responsibilities enforced on them.

This may come off as a little intense but this seems like the central issue with capitalism in our world today. Competition is competition to lower human expectations to increase corporate profits instead of giving more to humanity on the back of the corporation that has grown a capability to do it.

To me that doesn’t come off as intense at all, it’s just correctly reducing this down to the real underlying problem. Vital social tools that we use to live our lives are being operated by shady corporations for profit and not the greater good.

I experienced this while trying to get my air conditioner fixed on short notice during a heat wave last year. Got scammed in a minor way. Thanks for posting this. I saw it happening — dozens of clearly fake businesses with tons of 5 star reviews, with calls routed to the same call centers with the same predatory pricing schemes. Wasn’t sure how to report it, but calling it out like this is a good idea.

Almost got scammed by something like this when our dishwasher broke last year. Found on Google Maps a listing for “[locality] Appliance Repair”, in a small shopping center storefront nearby. Called the number and sounded like I had reached a large call center, with the sound of other people talking and typing in the background, so this was the first red flag (the storefront on the map would have been this small little place). They wanted a credit card number in advance, for which they’d charge $75 or something as a deposit, also unusual for this kind of business around here. Halfway through giving them my number my spidey sense reached a tipping point and I hung up.

Double checking the map later and looking at Street View, the storefront was conveniently obscured by a tree.

> Google Maps doesn't have a way to report an entire account as a bot; one can only flag a specific comment. There's also no way to provide enough information for Google Maps' trust & safety team to understand what's happening and figure out how they're evading Google's bot detection. So, it continues unabated.

But didn't they used to? Some of their old support articles used to mention the ability to report accounts, but that functionality seems to have disappeared.

I tried to report a business garnering fake 5* reviews last week and was frustrated that there was seemingly nothing I could do, especially since they buy and sell stolen goods.

> Google Maps doesn't have a way to report an entire account as a bot; one can only flag a specific comment.

I had been leaving reviews for about a decade on a number of businesses I interacted with.

Some were pretty bad and I had extensive reviews with photos etc. The most egregious was a hotel in Lisbon where all the fire extinguishers were empty (with pictures).

One day I got an email from google maps that one of my reviews had been reported and flagged, and that they removed all my reviews ever and disabled my ability to post reviews.

To this day, I have no way to reverse the decision, or even find out which review was reported and flagged. I can’t leave new reviews anymore, can’t talk to anyone at google about it (of course), and all my reviews have indeed been taken down (verified by going to places I remember reviewing and not seeing my review anymore when not logged in)

On one hand I feel it’s google’s loss for their own idiocy and blind automation, but on the other I feel like it’s just letting the scammy businesses win: just report reviews you don’t like and they’ll get taken away making your scammy business have only 5 star reviews.

I wouldn't put it past a Google employee to be involved in a scheme where they paid to have your review removed.

Considering the ethics of some of the businesses I reviewed, I wouldn’t be surprised either.