How does one correct a hijacked Google Maps place, when a new business changes a pre-existing places name and other details to the new business’s details and claims to be the places “Owner”?
A retail store by the name of Burlington recently opened on March 22, 2024 in Edmond, Oklahoma, USA and instead of creating a new business profile, completely stole an already pre-existing profile by changing the name, category, hours, website, phone number and registering themselves as the owner. The pre-existing business that has been receiving reviews for over five years was Bryant Square Shopping Center (Shopping Mall).
By hijacking a business that had not been claimed by the owners, Burlington automatically inherited over 1,868 Pre-existing reviews and a 4.3 star rating. When really only 10 reviews actually pertain to Burlington and 40% of those reviews consist of either 1 or 2 Star ratings within the last 2 months.
I have unsuccessfully attempted to edit the details back to the original Bryant Square Shopping Center (Pending) and have even attempted to call the unhelpful telephone number associated with Google customer service. Is there anything that can be done to correct a hijacked business profile or is this an unfixable Google Maps loophole where new businesses can steal reviews and mislead google maps users?
@LeviCain I’ve seen this before but never thought of it in a negative way. Perhaps I was wrong.
A local car distribution business was bought out by a massive foreign company, and the new owners changed the name. As an ongoing business, they then simply went into Google Maps and changed the name there. All my previously uploaded photos now display the new name, as well as the new photos I took with the new signage and decor.
Thank you for reading my post, I appreciate you taking the time to comment. I guess I should have clarified that the newly opened business replaced a single store location (formerly a Bed Bath & Beyond) and then hijacked a shopping mall/outlet mall google maps profile which is an accumulation of multiple businesses and the parking lot. So in this case it wasn’t a change in ownership of a single business but the opening of a new business that stole the google maps profile for the general accumulation of multiple businesses that share the same building/land lord. The shopping mall is still under the same ownership and was actively receiving reviews for at least the last 5 years until it was hijacked.
Thank you PrasadVR, I appreciate the link. I’m unfortunately not the owner of the business whose profile was hijacked so I don’t believe I can do much through the Business Community section but that is a very helpful link if I had been the business owner. It gave some great information for requesting ownership of a business profile enable to correct the business name and other details.
Thank you for reporting this. I will reach out to the relevant team to investigate. In the future, it’ll be helpful to share a Maps link to the location you’re reporting for the ease of forwarding the information internally. Thank you!
Hello @LeviCain Thank you for mentioning my name in your comment. But I didn’t receive any alert message because you have not tagged my name properly. kindly tag the name of the LG properly in comment so that an alert message goes to the LG. You can tag a LG who is already present in the post just type @ and automatically all the LGs would be listed below who are present in the discussion.
