Watch out for scammers and fake phone numbers for customer service and tech support
Heads up GetHuman fans and consumers worldwide — scammers are using a clever SEO hack that gets their fake tech support phone numbers into the first page of search results, hoping to lure you into calling them.
Every day, more and more searches for company contact information are yielding results like the ones show below. The search result has a complete bogus phone number in it that goes to the phone lines of a scam operation, often located overseas. One of the giveaways that the phone number is a fake is the use of strange symbols and formatting in the title, presumably to get around filters that detect this sort of thing. And then the descriptions of the pages often are stuffed with keywords related to popular search terms like “how to call iTunes” or “Facebook phone number”.
This is a scam that has been around for years. The recent twist is that scammers have figured out how to game Google’s search results to get pages with their bogus phone number in the title to show on the first page of search results. In the haste of fixing a problem, it’s easy to overlook this and just call the first number you see. Please don’t do this!
Here’s how it works — a scammer seeks out a website that have forums that allow users to post for free. The ones we are seeing most commonly at the point of writing this article are Yelp, Spotify, Facebook, LinkedIn, GoDaddy, and HubSpot, to name a few. On Yelp, the trick is to write a review or add a photo of a location. For LinkedIn, the trick is to create a new user profile with the phone number in the user’s name. For the rest, the trick is a posting in the help forums. Then, for the review or profile or post, the rest of the newly created page is filled with keywords related to popular searches for company contact information. By doing these things, scammers are able to use another company’s website and domain authority to get their phone number to show up in search results. And not just in the search results, but all the way at the top, where they are seen by millions of people.
So if you happened to have an iTunes issue today and searched on Google for “iTunes phone number” the LinkedIn profile below would be one of the first search results. If you happen to be in the middle of a particularly sticky problem with iTunes, you may not notice how strange this page really is. Why would iTunes Customer Service have a profile on LinkedIn? And why would they write a long list of keywords in the “About us” section? Well played, scammers.
As described in the article that we linked to above, the scam itself is pretty straightforward once you call the phone number. The person on the other end of the line will likely greet you as “customer service” or “tech support”. After that, the most common technique is to ask you to install software that allows them to remotely “look at” your computer. Regardless of technique, all of this leads them to eventually tell you that the issue is either a virus or malware, or that the problem is somehow your fault. And they can help you fix it if you buy a support package from them. If you fall for that, you’ve likely given them some personal information, a credit card number, and they likely have access to your computer as well. And they probably can’t fix your problem.
If you are reading this and wondering how somebody could fall for this, remember two things: first, when you’re in the midst of a customer issue and you’re trying to contact a company for help resolving it, you may be in a hurry or focused on the problem and not be paying attention to the format of the search results you happen to be looking at; second, GetHuman estimates that there are over 100 million searches for company contact information every month. With that volume, only a very tiny percentage of people would need to fall for this in order for the scam to work.
Another thing to bear in mind is that this scam is particularly effective for companies that don’t have a tech support department at all. Companies or products like Facebook and GMail can have billions of users, but because they are free, mass-consumer products, they don’t have a publicly posted phone number for customer support. Because of this, there are millions of people searching for these things every day, but scammers find it easier to hack their way to the top of search results with bogus numbers because there is less competition for those top search results. By comparison, a search for United Airlines’s phone number shows their Contact Us page at the very top. So it would be harder to create a page, even on the websites that are currently being exploited, that outranks that page for that search term. And also it would be harder for them to give you a convincing reason to part with your credit card information.
Spotting a fake — as mentioned above, there are telltale signs that the phone number you are looking at is a fake.
In the Netflix example on the left, you will also see that the phone number is punctuated with odd characters that are not usually used in conjunction with phone numbers like “^” or “_” or “*”. That’s because the websites they are exploiting by posting fake reviews or articles and Google itself do have mechanisms to detect this type of spam/scam. To help get around that scammers often will format the phone number strangely, adding strange symbols or replacing numbers with letters that look the same (letter “O” instead of number “0”, for example).
How to avoid getting scammed — If you want to check the accuracy of a customer service phone number, you can always look to GetHuman to make sure the number is real. We have phone numbers for popular companies like United Airlines and Apple that we check regularly, not to mention a number of special tools and other information to help you save time when you’re contacting those companies. Over time, millions of people have bookmarked our contact information pages as an added precaution in case they forget.
If for some reason you call the number and they are asking for payment to fix the issue, hang up because it’s probably a scam. Most companies that have customer support departments provide support for their products for free.
Never let anyone install any software either over the phone or through a download unless you have verified the phone number that you are calling, first. You can always verify a company phone number on GetHuman.
Report the fake number to the website publisher where you found the number as well as to Google. This may involve clicking into the forum and reporting the thread as spam to the publisher. Companies like Spotify are aware of this issue already, but it doesn’t hurt to let them know it’s still an issue in case it slipped through the cracks. If you want to report the link to Google, use this link to do so, and let them know the URL is a tech support phone number scam. This of course will prevent other users from getting scammed.
And be sure to bring this to the attention of your loved ones — particularly ones that are less likely to spot fake phone numbers or who haven’t spent much time searching the Web.
Let the company that hosts the free forum know as well. Tweeting at companies like Spotify, HubSpot, and LinkedIn know is a good way to bring this to their attention. Websites like theirs have community moderators who are on the lookout for scams like this and they can usually react quickly.
In short, be careful out there. If you’re unsure or suspect a company phone number you are looking at is a scam, you can always ask one of the GetHuman team members to take a look. We love helping customers, Tweet us or send us a message on Facebook and we’ll gladly take a look for you.
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