Business Owners Beware of Fake Google Scams

Here’s an often overlooked benefit that a small business gets when they have an ongoing program with an Internet Marketing / SEO Company: Having a trusted advisor, and expert in the field, on their team to prevent them from the many dangerous pitfalls online.

One of the most dangerous pitfalls is SPAM email and phone calls claiming to be from Google, but are actually not. Our team fields at least a few emails and calls from clients every day saying “we received a call from Google, what should we do?”.

If the client stays on the line, it will eventually patch them to a call with a company (that is definitely not Google) that will try to sell them services they do not need, and in many cases will actually hurt their business. In these cases we advise our clients to disregard the calls, protecting them from being taking advantage of.

While these fake Google phone calls can be terribly annoying and detrimental to a business, emails can actually be even more damaging. Below is an example of fake Google email SPAM that was sent to a client recently. Note the sensitive information has been whited out. The extremely dangerous part of this is that the email looks legitimate to a business owner, and if the “Click here” link was clicked on it would take the business owner to a fake Google login page where they would essentially be giving their Google account information over to whoever sent this email. We won’t go into all the details on what would happen next but the consequences for the business could have been very very bad.

Now we could dive into a few minor details of this email above which would be a red flag that this email was not actually from Google (such as the email from address and a couple pieces of bad grammar) but most importantly remember this: Google will never email you to ask for your password or other sensitive information. They have publicly stated that here.

And for that matter, they will never call you out of the blue either.

Here’s the larger point. There is unfortunately a large amount of pitfalls for the average business owner online that can cost thousands of dollars and many many hours of time. Even the most savvy business owners can easily fall victim to these scams if they are not careful.

Remember the tips above, but our best recommendation is to find a person or company in the Internet Marketing / SEO industry that you can trust, and work with them in an ongoing manner. They will guide you and ensure that you and your business avoid these pitfalls. When you factor in the larger value of working with a company like this (at a fraction of the cost you would pay an employee), it certainly makes a lot of sense to do so.