What will you do when you notice Spamming on Maps?
Will you try to identify the Spammer behind?
I noticed more and more spamming on Maps. How about you?
Any particular reasons behind them?
For me, I think the new Privacy Setting to not list all of our published Reviews / Photos in our Maps Profile is one major reason.
I saw a lot spammer on Google Map also. I believe they want to promo their product and service.
If I found a spammer I will try to click on the flag to report them.
I believe its not related to settings or tools @YK1001 I believe it is related to the size of the audience. The millions (if not billions) of people who use Maps every day and rely on the information make Maps a significant target for the nefarious. From simple spam where people hijack places (like the brewer’s website I found on a tourist attraction with a similar name) through to the ever present rash of “packers and movers” that infest the Maps in India and Bangladesh through to likely organised crime trying to drive business away from businesses they don’t profit from towards businesses that they do profit from. Fortunately there is a small army of Local Guides that are quite up to the task of slowing down and even eradicating the spammers.
Hello @YK1001
Yes, we may see spams even more than the past because we’ve more users on Maps day by day.
I’m one of spam hunters on the map and try to keep map safe from spammers. So I definitely try to identify the spammer and in most cases I found other spams on his/her profile too. The reason of spamming contains many things such as earning points by copy pasted reviews and photos or trying to be top on searches by keywords and duplicate points or destroying their rivals on the map. These are most reasons but also there could be also another reasons for some limited cases.
In Map Maker we had this ability to see edits history of users and it was good tool to find spam edits. Also about reviewing and photos, surely new privacy setting made it more difficult to find some spammers easily and also caused safer place for spammers. But still there are some ways to find them. For example when we see one spam, we can check to see if user has lots of reviews/photos and it shows potentially spamming activity so we can report the profile to the team with the example we saw individually.
Thanks @TonyChu @PaulPavlinovich @Amiran for your inputs.