Lay My Hat

I had a call a couple of days ago from +1 650-253-2000

It was the usual Indian accent without a trace of American.

And he was calling me from "Google Maps" apparently and wanted to me to verify my Google Maps entry for Greenbank.

I asked him how I can know that he is calling from Google Maps and he seemed to think that reading out the Google MyBusiness information from the screen would suffice to convince me. So we had a fun conversation while I was in the queue at the chemist while he tried to convince me that Google Maps really does phone people up to verify information which has already been published online for many months. I don't think so.

But I can't work out what he was trying to gain from it. Can you?

After a bit of googling, I can answer this myself: To my surprise, it's real!

Google Maps does get an Indian call centre to call up owners of MyBusiness entries to verify. And the phone number that called does apparently belong to Google. This info comes from the Google Maps support forum. People have been getting these calls since 2011 and unsurpisingly, they arouse a lot of suspicion.

Considering that Google send a postcard with a PIN to the address before the MyBusiness entry goes live, a daft phone call to verify address information seems a bit like overkill.