Welcome to the Diy Seo Show with your host Jeremy Poland. This is a show where we talk about exact tactics and solutions for small business owners, organizational leaders to do online marketing yourself with the power of agency level strategies, tools, tactics, et cetera. In today's episode, I'd like to talk about a warning a scam that has affected one of our clients and friends, something that is uh going around impacting Google business profiles, which as you know, for the majority of businesses are vitally important because Google business profiles are the key to the Google map.

Also tie into Google search rankings, reviews, et cetera, et cetera. And so anyone with a local presence has a Google business profile and uh needs to safeguard it. And uh I think uh some of you who've been dabbling and working in marketing for a while, know that Google business profiles are a little clunky to deal with and the support level and the uh is is low and the threat level is fairly high. So let's talk about this particular scam and what happened? We I work with a shooting range, firearm range in the Houston area and they uh you can see here on the screen, they have a Google business profile over 53 reviews.

They are located next to a gun store and some gun firearm training areas and share the same address. And so that may have been part of the trigger for the scam as we did uh a debriefing on the whole scenario. So the scam begin with a request for ownership. Maybe you, you didn't know this, but anyone can click on your Google business profile and claim the business begin a process to attempt to claim the business, claim ownership and say, oh yeah, we own this business or I'm the rightful owner of this business, um which is a process that you would use if you are the owner of your business and you haven't ever claimed your profile and Google has created one because it's noticed your business online, phone records, et cetera.

But imagine somebody from the outside with a scammer intent, clicking to claim your business profile which triggers an email that goes to the currently list current listed owner. In this case, the entity requesting ownership uh was not a private individual. Bill Jones, Tina Smith, et cetera, who we could have recognized as either involved with the company or not involved with the company. In this case, the scammers used a deceptive name called Google business management comma business owner. And so when I saw this, I immediately thought, oh, this is Google.

They used a Google my business, a logo or icon and the phone number resembled a Google phone number. And so I thought this was a Google help service or Google service request, et cetera, asking for access to the Google business profile. Now, of course, in hindsight, this all seems silly, but imagine you quickly an email like this and it looks like Google and you don't necessarily give it a whole lot of thought. You could simply click and give away ownership of your business profile to a scammer organization in this instance, located in India.