Report Hijack feature in Maps

[#1]

In some developing countries, there have been many cases of businesses who want a fast track presence in Google Maps, and one way they do it is to rename/hijack an existing location (usually one with many very high reviews and ratings usually like tourists attractions or malls etc), and then claim the business. That means the actual location then becomes lost, and they would create a new location to replace the one they have hijacked. Have seen many cases like this. And reporting these cases sometimes it not easy.

Not limited to the the above. There could be many other cases of location hijacks.

1. Spammers mass renaming certain businesses or places.

2. Political hijacks where government services or offices are renamed to offending names

3. Mass category changes for certain business branches

etc

If anyone has any experience on this, you can share below and what process you took to help recover/reverse the hijack.

My suggestion is if there is somewhere in Maps that we can incorporate a report a Hijack, it would help to give an alert to Google to verify, which should be quite easy. Previous reviews are proof of a suspected hijack. And Google backend can quickly verify and revert to previous information before the change.

[YK1001]

What should happen if only the ownership is hijacked?  The POI details are all correct .

[Stuart_C]

@YK1001 Ownership is probably hard to hijack (need a postal address / phone number,etc.).

I think  @StephenAbraham is referring to the name of the POI being changed along with business category, which is common. In that case, only those details of the POI need changing back to the original. But it's not easy for us to do. 

[YK1001]

Hi @Stuart_C,

I have the same expectation that Ownership hijacking is hard.  That's why it is shocking to see it  happen.

[NigelA]

Sometimes  what looks like a hijacked listing can be a listing that is  a result of an incorrect merge of two different businesses at the same address (perhaps a  Christian church and a nearby school both named after the same saint).   Googlers looking at a possible hijack should  check the  place's history to see whether a merge needs to be undone.

[Osaka78forTRUMP]

Dear @StephenAbraham, hope all's well. 

We believe the process you're describing already exists and is more subtle than using a highjack option. We believe the current spam reporting tools are simple by design. 

We report any places we believe are spam or hijacked etc, then trust Google to figure out what to do with the reported place. 

We see value in your idea because suggested edits for places are categorized: edit or remove. Softening the language of the user interface may reduce the fear of Google wrongly removing hijacked places and help generate larger numbers of useful spam reports. Please note that hijack is a fairly confronting word too.

We love the simplicity of Maps spam reporting because there is only one thing to figure out on our end. Do we believe it's spam? If yes, report it.

Kind regards from Osaka78 🙂 

[GhazalaShah]

1. Omg terrible things are happening! I never suspected of any such mischief of identity theft of places..!! Okay @StephenAbraham shall try to keep a watch for such a misconduct on Maps.

[ShubhamBadal]

This is the need of the hour. Many public places, apartment buildings, etc. in India have been hijacked (i.e. claimed as 'My Business' on Google Maps) by various small shops and companies to boost their business.

I know places that have been hijacked since more than a year but no action has been taken.

Example:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Top+Billing+software+in+Gwalior+%7C+instabillings.com+%7C+GST+Mana...

There is no option to report and Google is not taking this seriously enough.

[PoliMC]

Hello @StephenAbraham,

We would like to thank you for your idea, but we did not manage to implement it in time. According to our Idea Exchange policies we are going to close your idea.