Many big companies make it increasingly difficult to find and reach their support hotlines, likely in an effort to forward people to FAQ sites and other measures to answer questions before they’re asked. One place that makes it easy to find phone numbers straight away isGoogle Maps, which usually prominently features a hotline in the business listing. It looks like you shouldn’t blindly trust that it’s correct, though. Crafty scammers have replaced some airline hotlines on Google Maps with their own.
Twitter user@Shmuli’s Delta flight got canceled, prompting him to seek out hotline assistance when he realized that the customer service line was overrun, relying on Google Maps to find the correct number (via Artem Russakovski). The line broke up just a minute after he started telling the other side that he needed a new flight, only to be called back from a French number with a completely unrelated name as its Caller ID — certainly suspicious. The person on the other side identified themselves as an airline representative and was eager to help, acquiring data like the name and the confirmation number.
Things quickly got fishier, though. @Shmuli was supposed to confirm the new flight to a different number via SMS, and he would have to pay for the new flight reservation. Becoming suspicious, the Twitter user ended the call stating that he didn’t feel comfortable with this arrangement and feared he was being scammed, and the supposed Delta representative didn’t offer any alternatives. Instead, the person kept pressing @Shmuli via text later, asking to pay five times the original price to rebook.
The Google Maps listing in question that @Shmuli relied on was the one in place for Delta’s local help desk in John F. Kennedy Airport, and he managed to find a few more examples, like American Airlines local Google Maps listing in the airport, which also listed wrong numbers. At the time of writing, both the fake Delta Airlines and American Airlines numbers have since been replaced with the correct ones.
Scammers have abused Google Maps with similar tactics for a long time, so this strategy of hijacking phone numbers isn’t entirely new. They take advantage of the fact that many parts of Google Maps are crowdsourced, with Google only offering lax safeguards against users making tweaks to business listings. For example, it’s easy to correct opening hours and other information on Google Maps listings, which does serve the community — but can also be abused.
Another strategy used by scammers on Google Maps is the creation of fake businesses. This is often the case for locksmiths, as pointed out in replies to the Twitter thread, and similar businesses you usually only seek out at a moment of panic and urgency, making you more susceptible to exploitation. There are even scams targeting small business owners, posing as Google telling them that they need to pay money or their listing will be removed from Maps or adding a bulk of negative reviews to their listings, promising to remove them only when a ransom is paid.
There is no perfect protection against scams on Google Maps with the way the platform currently works. It relies on the power of the crowd to add ratings, information, and photos to listings to make the service more useful for everyone. Google could add an option that would only allow business owners to update core information on their listing, but then Maps would lose out on thousands of businesses that don’t actively maintain their Maps presence at all.
When dealing with big companies like airlines, it’s best to rely on their app or website for information. The same is true for smaller businesses, though the more local you go, the harder it might be to find this information in other places — and even then, it’s possible that you end up on a fake website with fake information. In the end, you always have to use common sense and shouldn’t agree to anything that seems suspicious to you.
