Google has issued an urgent warning to anybody who uses Maps. Google Maps users are being warned to take caution and exercise vigilance.
Google has warned millions of Maps users over a new scam – and the tech giant is saying it’s too risky to ignore. Fraudsters and scammers are using "contributed content" for reviews and ratings, the search engine giant has warned.
Scammers have been overlaying inaccurate phone numbers on the top of contributed photos, Google has warned. In response, the tech company has introduced a "new machine learning model" to weed out any scammers.
Google said: "With this model, we successfully detected and blocked the vast majority of these fraudulent and policy-violating images before they were published." The search giant removed millions of pieces of user-submitted fake content from Google Maps in 2022, said Ashish Gupta earlier this year.
Gupta, Google's engineering director for user-generated content, said 115 million policy-violating reviews were removed. Google also removed 200 million photos and 7 million videos that were "blurry, low quality, or violated our content policies."
Google also stopped 20 million attempts to create fake business profiles, Gupta said. "Scammers started overlaying inaccurate phone numbers on top of contributed photos, hoping to trick unsuspecting victims into calling the fraudster instead of the actual business," Gupta added.
The company said its machine learning tech was able to pick up on these fake images, removing them from Google Maps faster and in many cases blocking them before they were published. Google is advising business owners to be on guard against potential scam activity, too.
"When in doubt, hang up. If you receive an unwanted or unexpected call from someone who claims to be an official representative of an organization and asks for money, feel free to hang up anytime," the company said in a previous warning.
