Scammers upload AI-generated photos with fake phone numbers to Google Business Profiles

Search Engine Roundtable reported on 10 September 2026 that scammers are using the Google Maps contributor program to upload AI-generated photos onto real Google Business Profiles, with a phone number written into the image. When a searcher sees the profile and calls the number in the photo, they reach the scammer rather than the business.

Barry Schwartz, who wrote the piece, says the technique is not new but that he has not covered it before, and that Google's spam reporting flow is not removing the images. The trigger for the write-up was a LinkedIn post from Sam Sarsten sharing details from Naomi Stevens, a local SEO practitioner who found the problem on a client's profile.

What Stevens found on one client

Stevens says a Google Maps contributor uploaded an AI-generated image to her client's Google Business Profile for a roofing company. The image carries the client's real business name but a phone number that does not belong to the business. Google is displaying the image prominently on the profile, so it "almost looks like a cover image or profile pic".

Stevens checked the contributor's account and says the same person has more than 150 photo contributions across unrelated businesses in the United States, with the same fake phone number appearing on multiple images. The pattern, in her words, "looks like systematic spam intended to redirect calls".

Her reporting flow got nowhere. She reported the image, contacted Google support, and received an automated reply pointing at unrelated help articles. She then tried to bury the image by uploading a logo, a cover image and more photos, and none of them replaced the fake one in the display slot.

The account named in the write-up

Schwartz names one contributor account, "Jack Edward", and says the account is posting the same fake number across many listings. His observation is that the same phone number across many uploads is a pattern Google could match on and remove at scale, and that the removal is not happening in practice. That is the observation, not a claim Google has confirmed.

Why this rises now

Two changes make an old technique work again. Cheap image generation makes an on-brand cover photo, complete with a phone number in the frame, a few-second job rather than a Photoshop one. And Google's own profile display promotes user contributions high enough that a single well-placed upload can outrank a legitimate business's own logo and cover image, at least until the owner uploads a run of replacements.

For a local business owner, the fastest self-defence is to open the profile in an incognito window, look at what a searcher sees, and check whether the phone number in the header image matches the number in the profile's contact fields. For an agency running Google Business Profiles at scale, the same audit becomes a scripted check across every client every week: fetch each profile's photo list, flag any image whose contributor is not the owner and whose OCR contains a phone number, and escalate through a Google Business Profile support channel with the specific contributor account and photo IDs rather than through generic spam reporting.

Source

• Google Maps Phone Number in Photo Scam, Search Engine Roundtable, 10 September 2026