Google Caught Misbehaving By Kenyan Startup

An anonymous reader sends in an interesting story from Mocality, a company that painstakingly built a business directory in Kenya. When they discovered that somebody was systematically harvesting the contact information they'd collected (and after a few very odd phone calls from confused Kenyan business owners), they set up a sting to see what was really going on. They swapped out the phone numbers listed for a few businesses with phone numbers in their own call centers, and then waited to see who called. Mocality was shocked to discover it was Google Kenya, who falsely claimed a business collaboration with Mocality, and then lied about Mocality's business practices.

Comments

Outright fraud

[antitithenai]

This wasn't just misbehaving. What Google did was outright illegal. Not only did they falsely claim that they have business partnership with Mocality, they also claimed that Mocality is engaging in bait-and-switch practices to try and charge businesses up to $200 for their listing. Mocality said they have never charged businesses and never will.

Such blatant lies aren't just misbehavior, they are pure fraud. Google is trying to destroy their competitor in any way possible and in turn profit from lies. This is not a new practice to Google - they haven't been able to gain market share in social space because Facebook and Twitter got there first (of who did it well), and it's seriously injuring their currently. They are desperately trying to change that with Google+ but they know they're unable to do so because they weren't there at the right time. Google is also facing serious competition in Russia, China, South Korea and a few other countries where local search engines have the largest market share and Google is unable to compete as again, they weren't there at the right time.

Google has a long history of scraping other websites and then dropping them lower in search in favor of their own sites. They have been doing this for ages with hotels, restaurants and similar information. They're also trying to do it with flights information. All of these practices will net Google enemies and most likely antitrust issues. But Google doesn't care - they know how important timing is and they will abuse their position whenever they can to get there. It's a long term goal and Google has managed to get the position where no one can really touch them even if they misbehave. Seriously, they were also found out polluting search engines with paid links. After that they blame someone else and try to seem like a good guy. The most hilarious thing is that most geeks believe them just because they use open source (while ironically their products are all proprietary).

And note that this isn't just Google's Kenyan office misbehaving. They also received calls from Google's Indian call centers engaging in similar practices, so this is a practice accepted from Google's HQ.
On top of that, EPIC has said they will try to get antitrust investigation into Google's introduction of Google+ into search results. People are finally starting to wake up to see how bad Google is and how it abuses other companies.

Re:Outright fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

It's important to note that, there is no hard evidence that it's google at all. It's all circumstantial.

The first IP address is not owned by Google, but the callers identified as being Google. So at this point in the game I would have thought that a scam was going on, and "Google" is just cover for the fraudster.

The second IP from india is owned by Google, and the caller identified as Google. At this point it seems that Google authorized this. But maybe that's not what really happened?

What if someone higher up the chain at Google had decided to open an office in Kenya for sales leads, but the resulting office were poorly trained, or even encouraged to cheat by any means possible (this is what came to mind when I read the transcript sections, as this is similar language that high-pressure sales that commissioned sales take.) Then, maybe for performance reasons, the Google company representative decided to use their India call center to call more businesses in a shorter period of time.

Like I doubt whoever reports to to the Google CEO was directly involved in this. If you know anything about the call center hierarchy , outsourced, even company-owned call centers don't go up the chain at all. It's usually something like...
CSR - CSR team lead - CSR Supervisor - CSR Manager - Call center Director (And this guy only runs the call center, it's only responsible for operations, not responsible for policy) The "Client" eg Google (Keyna) might be the next person up, or maybe there's a Google Africa Business development, before it ever gets to someone in the US.

But from experience, either commissions or some other metric probably caused a loss of policy adherence. If I were to blame someone, I'd blame whoever authorized the script. Somewhere along the line they were saying they associated with Mocality, instead of identifying that they found their contact information from Mocality. At that point something wasn't right.

But it's also entirely possible that Google had absolutely nothing to do with this, and rather someone had scraped the data and selling it to Google but identified as Mocality to Google.

I sure hope someone gets to the bottom of it, because it this is happening in Kenya, it may be happening everywhere.

Re:Outright fraud

[NeutronCowboy]

Looks like he sure did. To wit:
- First Post, if a subscriber wouldn't have beaten him to it
- First post with links and long, well crafted argument about how evil Google is.
- Brand new account created for pretty much this story only
- Only comments are MS is great and Google is evil.

The only person who beat him to the punch is a subscriber who can see the results early. My suspicion is that DCTech actually submitted the story.

Real or fake?

[happylight]

So is the person calling actually from Google? Or is it just some scammer claiming to be from Google?

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Tufriast]

The corporate offices in Google CA were traced to this issue; check his IP logs he has. I might be foggy on this, but from what I saw, this came from California as well.

Re:That is Google KENYA's responsibility.

[wytcld]

Engage in racist slander much? Read the article. Kenya is not so corrupt a place. I have close friends who worked for years there (in other business sectors) who confirm that.

Also, is it your view that branch offices of American corporations, if they should find themselves somewhere more corrupt than America, should join in the corruption? That's an odd view. There's specific American law against that, in fact, with strong penalties against a firm's American corporate operation if it can be proven that it enabled or condoned corrupt practices abroad. Whether American law covers the specific varieties of corruption alleged here I can't speak to. But do you really believe that there's nothing wrong with American corporations having foreign branches and subsidiaries engage in corruption?

Re:Do no evil indeed

[tripleevenfall]

I wonder if the same excuse-making would apply if this had been Bing/Microsoft?

Yuck...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I work at Google, and generally the FUD I hear around here is just that. This sounds truly awful though.

For what it's worth, I do believe this is a Kenya office problem. Individual offices have a ton of autonomy and a call center will do what they're told. From the central office perspective, (a) they really do believe what they preach, and (b) this is just retarded. In the grand scheme of things, nobody cares about Kenyan business listings except for the top people in the Kenyan office trying to make a name for themselves.

Assuming it really is all true, I hope heads roll, and I hope Google makes amends before the courts makes amends for them.

Speaking about fraud

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Well ... That depends, don't you agree ?

Apparently facebook is ("was") paying people for bad-mouthing google. I am not saying that's necessarily the case here, but it's certainly a datapoint to consider.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[montyzooooma]

I field calls from companies claiming to be Google at least once a week. They aren't Google, they're people wanting to intermediate between a customer and eg Adwords. It's a scam, pure and simple. Whether this is the case here I can't say for sure, but I'd be surprised if it was official Google policy.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[NeutronCowboy]

Not sure what's going on here, as a user-agent string means nothing, and there's a lot of outsourcing going on. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the investigation Mocality did, and for the tools they have, it was fairly sophisticated.

What I'd like to know is how Google reacts to this. I'm generally of the opinion that someone is innocent until proven guilty (I've been wrong too many times to be able to still jump to conclusions). This might just be a lot of smoke without fire, but if Google is serious about its reputation, it needs to at least address the issue.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[LordLimecat]

Doesnt anyone find it really odd to hear that Google is offering to sell websites when...
A) Ive never heard of Google calling ANYONE, or even having any call centers
B) Im not aware of Google having a business selling or creating websites
C) Scammers will claim ANYTHING that will get you to sign up for something

I mean I get the whole Google is evil thing, but this just isnt Google's style, and it sounds like a classic scam. Especially when the caller starts with "Im from G-o-o-g-l-e-dot-c-o-m".

Really, none of this strikes anyone as strange and out of character?