How to go bankrupt with Google Maps

Rene Bertagna is the owner of a Serbian Crown restaurant not far from Washington. More precisely, the former owner. In April 2014, he had to close the business. He blames bankruptcy not on anyone, but on the Google Maps map service. The businessman even filed a lawsuit against Google in the federal court of Virginia.

The restaurant has been working for 40 years, but in the past few years the number of customers has fallen by 75%. According to the owner, someone edited the information record in the Google Maps service and indicated that the institution does not work on weekends, although it was on weekends that most visitors came here to try French and Russian cuisine.


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Unfortunately, Rene Bertagna found out too late the reason why people stopped coming. Worse, Google refused to immediately fix the entry on the Serbian Crown page. This was the basis for a lawsuit.

Perhaps the chances of Bertagni to win in court can be considered miserable. Lawyers of Google in a preliminary statement called his claims "ridiculous." But the fact is that the problem of spam on Google Maps has long been known. It is connected with the fact that the service works partly on a crowdsourcing model, so that anyone can edit the content.

For example, in the spring of this year, network engineer Brian Sealy (Bryan Seely) repeatedly asked Google to improve the moderation of ads, and even opened an account on Twitter with the publication of examples , but to no avail. Then the resourceful engineer came up with a way to attract attention .



He posted a few fake ads on Google Maps, listing the addresses of the FBI and the US Secret Service, but his own phone numbers. When people called these numbers, Brian directed the call to the real numbers of the special services — and included an audio recording. After recording a couple of conversations for proof, he went with them to the local branch of the Secret Service. The agents twisted the "spy": they put him on the floor, face down, read the rights and took him to the interrogation room, but in the end everything ended well.

After this story, Google reacted quickly and removed some of the fake ads, although in fact the problem remained that we see in the example of the hapless restaurant owner.