You arrive at home after a long and somewhat stressful day at work. And then you notice that – hurried as you were this morning - you have forgotten your keys. So you can’t enter your own house. Damn. A locksmith will be needed to pass the barrier you are now staring at, originally meant to keep out burglars, but not you: the front door.
Fortunately you do have your smartphone with you, and there is an app on it which is great at finding businesses around the area where you live: Google Maps. So you enter locksmith as a search term there, and the locksmiths pop up within seconds. Great – life is already looking a bit brighter again. None of the locksmiths in the search results is known to you (after all: how often does one require the services of a locksmith? If you find yourself forgetting your keys every week, there’s probably another type of service provider you need to consult…), so you just pick one nearby, as it should preferably be someone who doesn’t have to travel too far to reach your non-cooperative front door (as they most likely will also charge you the time needed to get there as well as the distance covered).
What did I find on the map?
Let’s say, for the sake of developing this case study, that I live in the area of Brussels and am urgently in need of a locksmith. So, I open Maps on my phone and type in locksmith. This is what then shows up.
Quite a few locksmiths in the area. Nice result, wouldn’t you agree? A bit strange that most of them have the word Proximity in their name. Would there be something like a chain of locksmiths? Never heard of that. So let’s have a look at the list with the search results.
Well maintained POI-entries, it seems. Slotenmaker is the Dutch word for locksmith and the word in the middle is always a city name. A pity, though, that none of them has any ratings or reviews. The next step then is taking a closer look by opening one of the list entries.
Wow, open 24/7, that is quite convenient. Or is it a first indication that something could be wrong here? Another strange thing: there is no house number in the address. The street is one where also other businesses are located, as you can see from the Street View preview – oh yeah, right, the fact that a Street View image is showing up there means that there are no pictures of the POI either, not from the business owner and not from local guides. That is actually also a bit strange, as the business is claimed. And perhaps the map marker is also not in the best possible location, as checking the Street View images doesn’t seem to show the locksmith in an obvious way in that area. So the owner seems to be a bit sloppy: not entering the house number, not positioning the map marker correctly, not even adding 1 single picture,…
OK, but there is a link to the website, so let’s check that.
Looking quite good - finally a sign that makes it all look a bit more trustworthy? It’s all in Dutch, as that is the local language, but you can believe me: it contains the information you would expect on such a website. The markings in yellow, by the way, are mine and serve to illustrate why the website is in fact not a sign of trustworthiness after all.
Because, if I check out the website of one of the other POIs, it turns out to be a perfect copy of that website, with only the name of the town replacing the other town name (the yellow markings I added).
Checking out more of the POIs, I notice that the oddities I found on the first one are really a pattern across all of them: 24/7 opening hours, no ratings or reviews, well-known street but no house number, no pictures, and nothing to be seen on Street View.
A final look at the website reveals one last suspicious feature: the text on the contact page above the button to submit a request is very strange. It’s in Dutch – well, I should say: the words are all Dutch - but the text is complete rubbish. It seems to be a word-for-word translation of a GDPR-related message.
What did I do?
All of this reminded me of something I had read about, but never had seen on Maps myself: locksmith fraude. The scheme I read about was basically this: someone sets up fake locksmith POIs on Maps and makes them look like local businesses. They then collect the incoming calls or web requests only to sell them as leads to real locksmiths. So, in reality a lead generation operation, not real locksmiths on actual addresses.
Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding: I’m not saying this is a case of fraude, but only that it has a lot of the characteristics of what I had read about before. A final hint that something fishy might be going on here turns up when I start looking for other services that are also needed rarely, but when needed it is often urgent: window suppliers and services to repair heating. Just check the following 2 pictures (armed with the knowledge that the Dutch word for window supplier is glazenmaker and that the Dutch word verwarming means heating) and think back of what I have been explaining earlier…
By now I had collected enough indications to conclude that in my view these POIs on Maps were not real, physical places and therefore needed to be removed from Google Maps. So I reported some of them as Does not Exist, some other as Spam (just to see if the effect would be different).
What was the result?
The ones I have reported are now (a couple of weeks later) no longer to be seen on Maps (both the ones reported as Does not exist and those reported as Spam), as you can see in the final screenshot: when I use the full name of one of the POIs I reported as search terms in Maps, it should obviously show that one as the first search result, but it is simply no longer there at all.
Another #LGCTM success! Guess what I will now be doing with the ones still showing up in the screenshot (and afterwards with a bunch of window suppliers and heating repair services)?
[UPDATE 10/05/2020]
I decided - a couple of weeks after starting to report more of those POIs as spam - to make the exact same search for the exact same area as the screenshot I used to start this post. The result is looking quite nice, if you ask me: still a few to go, but most are gone now.
[UPDATE 01/06/2020]
Take a look at the screenshot below. No further comment needed, I guess. Me happy.
This post is part of the Local Guides Clean The Map project (#LGCTM). All details and links to loads of other posts can be found here.
And here’s an overview of the case studies published so far:
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and I was looking forward to the moment when you manage to catch the tricky locksmiths and restore justice. 
