Scam Alert!

One of our clients made an update to his map marker location, shortly after which he received a phone call from someone identifying themselves as a “Google Specialist”. The caller identified that there was a location update. Verify the correct address and then said “your business is listed as miscellaneous” — our customer indicates that they were actually properly classified — “you’re not showing up in the top 7”, “We have a place that can help you if you’re interested”.

I’m going to transfer you to Loren who will give you rates and options for getting listed.

Loren as it turns out works for a company in Irvine CA called eGumball.

It would appear from this client report that eGumball is posing as Google to qualify the lead prior to passing to their sales staff. Further, eGumball is making false statements, in this case “your business is listed as miscellaneous”.

Before posting this I did a little web searching and discovered the same approach reported on another site:

“Hi my name is […] am I speaking with the owner of […]?” Yes. “We wanted to let you know that your business category is showing up as miscellaneous and therefore not ranking well. Would you like to change that?”

Whether or not this is fraudulent is for the courts to decide, but it is clearly deceptive.

This kind of behavior gives our profession a bad name. Have you received a call from eGumball? Have you received calls from other services who deceptively tried to make you believe they were with Google? What were their scammy pitches?