If you got a call from someone claiming to be “Google Support” telling you your Business Profile is about to be suspended, deleted, or needs urgent verification, and they want a payment, a code read over the phone, or a link they just texted you, hang up. That’s not Google. The FTC and the Better Business Bureau have both put out consumer warnings on this exact scam because it targets small business owners specifically. If you’ve gotten one of these calls, you’re not the only one, and it’s worth two minutes to know the tell.
I get why the call works on people. Whoever’s calling usually knows your business name and sometimes your address, and caller ID can be spoofed to look like it’s coming from Google or a “verified partner.” Some versions offer to jump you to the top of search results for a fee. Others say your listing got flagged and needs action right now or it goes dark.
How Google actually contacts you about your listing
Google’s real Business Profile support shows up through the dashboard itself, where a notice sits in your account when you log in, or through an email tied to a support case you opened yourself. The one phone call Google will place to you about your PROFILE is the automated verification call during setup, and that one only happens because you requested it, and it reads back a numeric code and nothing else. (Google Ads reps really do call sometimes about your ad account — that’s a different, legitimate thing. I’m talking here about calls threatening your Business Profile listing.) If the first you’re hearing about a “problem” with your listing is a stranger calling you, unprompted, asking for money, access, or your login, that mismatch is the tell by itself, before anything else in the call.
What the scam is actually after
Most of these calls want one of three things: a payment, your Business Profile login under the guise of “verifying your account,” or “manager” access to your listing so they can make changes, swap out your phone number, or lock you out entirely. Losing manager access is the worst outcome of the three, because getting it back means proving ownership to Google from scratch while a stranger controls your listing, your reviews, and the phone number customers see when they search for you. Every day that phone number is theirs instead of yours is a day of calls that were supposed to ring on your desk going somewhere else, or nowhere at all.
What to actually do
Hang up, and don’t call back any number they gave you. If you want to check whether anything is actually wrong, log into Google Business Profile yourself, typing the address in rather than clicking a link from the call or a text, and look at your own dashboard. If there’s a real notice, it’ll be sitting there waiting. If there’s nothing there, the call was fake, full stop. Worth reporting too: ReportFraud.ftc.gov takes it directly, and BBB’s Scam Tracker keeps a running log of this exact pattern, so your report helps the next owner who gets the same call.
If you already gave up a login or granted access before catching on, go check who else has access to your listing and kick off anyone you don’t recognize right away, then change your Google account password. If they locked you out entirely, Google does have an ownership-recovery process for exactly this, even though it’s slower than anyone wants it to be.
The owners who get caught by this aren’t careless. They’re busy, and a call that sounds official and urgent is built specifically to exploit that. The actual defense is simple: no legitimate Business Profile problem ever gets sprung on you as a surprise phone call demanding money, a code, or access right now. If a call about your listing says otherwise, that call is the whole scam.
Not sure what’s actually sitting on your own Google Business Profile right now, or who has access to it? I built a free audit tool that checks the real state of your profile.