Fake Phone Numbers in Google Maps Photos

Search Engine Roundtable has reported a scam in which people upload photos to Google Business Profiles that carry a phone number belonging to someone else. A customer looking at your listing sees the image, dials the number printed on it, and reaches a scammer instead of you.

This is a trade publication reporting what local search practitioners have described on LinkedIn. It is not an announcement from Google, and Google has not, as far as the report says, confirmed the scale of the problem or described a fix.

What the report describes

Anyone can contribute photos to a business listing on Google Maps — that is how the contributor programme works. According to the report, scammers are using that route to upload AI-generated images that show a business's own name alongside a phone number that does not belong to it.

Naomi Stevens, quoted via a LinkedIn group post shared by Sam Sarsten, described finding such an image on a roofing client's profile. She wrote that Google was displaying it prominently, "so it almost looks like a cover image or profile pic". She checked the contributor account and found 150+ photo contributions to unrelated businesses across the US, with the same wrong phone number appearing on images for other businesses too.

She reported the image and contacted Google support, and said the reply was a generic list of solutions to common issues, none of them relevant. Adding more photos, a logo and a cover image did not push the fake image out of the way.

Barry Schwartz notes that the technique is not necessarily new, but that reporting it to Google "seems to be doing nothing" in these cases. That is his and the practitioners' account of what happened to them — not a statement of Google policy.

What you should do

This one is worth ten minutes of your time, because you will not be told if it happens to you.

Look at your own photos. Open your Google Business Profile on Maps as a customer would, and scroll through the photo gallery — not just the ones you uploaded, but the tab showing photos from others. You are looking for anything with a phone number printed on it, and anything that looks like a generated image of your shop, van or signage that you did not make.

Check the number on the listing itself. The phone number in the profile fields is the one you control. Confirm it is correct and current. If you have not been through your profile fields in a while, our guide on what to put on your Google Business Profile covers the basics.

Report anything you find. Use the report option on the image itself. The accounts in this report suggest that may not get a fast result, so keep a screenshot and a note of the date. If you use a Google Business Profile support channel, describe the problem plainly: a third-party photo on your listing displays a phone number that is not yours.

Make sure customers have a second way to check. This is the practical defence. If someone can land on your own website and see your real number, the fake one on a photo has less chance of catching them. That is one of the sturdier arguments for having a site of your own alongside the profile — you control what it says, and nobody can contribute a photo to it.

What we do not know

We do not know how widespread this is, how long removals take, or whether Google is working on detecting these images. The report speculates that Google could match the repeated phone number across listings, but that is the author's suggestion, not a described plan.

Check your photos, and check them again in a month or two. That is the whole of the advice at this stage.