Why is London suddenly full of fake ice cream shops?

March 24, 2022 5:57 AM

In London, searching Google Maps for "ice cream shop" is suddenly bringing up a a bunch of nearly identical entries. They're clearly fake: they have no reviews or opening hours; none of them show up in street view; and I have walked past at least one of the addresses in the past week and there was no ice cream to be found. Plus they all have identical websites. What's going on?

PS: I checked Google Maps for Brighton, Manchester, Dublin, and New York, and couldn't find anything similar. It seems to be a London-only phenomenon.

posted by yankeefog to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Response by poster: Sorry--the link for "identical websites" should have gone to this screenshot.
posted by yankeefog at 6:00 AM on March 24, 2022

The Wappalyzer plugin in Chrome shows those sites as being created by the Google My Business CMS.

My guess would be some sort of web development project to automate the creation process for Google Business listings with "valid" website details, accepted addresses etc. and / or testing / attempting to decypher Google's result ranking weightings for SEO purposes.

Make me wonder whether you could sell such an automated process as a sort of market research service for businesses looking for premises - run dummy listings and sites for a few months to see which neighbourhoods get the best set of search results and hits.
posted by protorp at 6:18 AM on March 24, 2022

If you have the time, you should probably report them as fraudulent listings.
posted by fight or flight at 6:32 AM on March 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

This is a long-standing problem with Google Maps. I remember a few years ago, Google Maps was showing a linens shop as existing in the empty field across from my workplace.
posted by alex1965 at 6:55 AM on March 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of the years-long problem with fake locksmiths on Google Maps. But that scam ends with you calling a phone number and a fake locksmith showing up at your house and ripping you off. I can't imagine that working for ice cream.
posted by Nelson at 8:08 AM on March 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Huh, I ran into a bunch of imaginary yarn stores in upper Manhattan on Google maps. I wonder if that’s the same thing.
posted by LizardBreath at 8:47 AM on March 24, 2022

Two possibilities, IMHO

1) Someone is testing their ability "batch" populate Google maps with entries for businesses

2) Someone is maliciously trying to downgrade someone else's ice cream shop SEO by polluting the listings with invalid chaff, maybe just as "reputation management", maybe as a prelude to a solicitation ("Did your SEO tank? Let us help!")
posted by kschang at 9:33 AM on March 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

A couple of friends suggested they might be people who have set themselves up as food delivery places – for Deliveroo, Uber Eats, etc – and this is part of them trying to look more like legitimate "places" to order from. I don't have any food delivery apps (I live too far away from civilisation to get any) so can't check.

It still seems odd that they all follow such an identical format though. Unless there's some benefit to a larger company creating what look (very superficially) like local food delivery locations?
posted by fabius at 10:49 AM on March 25, 2022

Response by poster: Thanks, everybody! All your explanations sound plausible.

I reported a few of them but there are so darn many that I ultimately felt like I was doing free labor for Google.
posted by yankeefog at 4:11 AM on March 29, 2022