Google's Kenyan ripoff?

Crossposting this from another thread:<p>Oh, malarky.<p>Here. I set up a page at <a href="http://lab2.gibsonandlily.com/google.html" rel="nofollow">http://lab2.gibsonandlily.com/google.html</a><p>Then I ran it through google translation services. Here is the result in apache's log:<p>74.125.16.18 - - [13/Jan/2012:10:45:37 -0600] "GET /google.html HTTP/1.1" 200 327 "<a href="http://translate.google.com/translate_p?hl=en&#38;sl=fr&#38;tl=en&#38;u=http://lab2.gibsonandlily.com/google.html&#38;usg=ALkJrhjD8_-6RDHslD53lf9XsYx2_J1q4A" rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.com/translate_p?hl=en&#38;sl=fr&#38;...</a> "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.75 Safari/535.7,gzip(gfe)<p>Look familiar? This one is tossing up windows NT, which is strange, but it doesn't seem like a stretch that some of the machines at google for stuff like this are running linux.<p>The scam here isn't being done by google, it's just a run-of-the-mill scammer scamming and using google's name.<p>Dearest mocotality. Turning on referals in apache logs and you'll see where on google this is coming from (if you care to).<p>Here is how:<p>in: /etc/apache2/apache2.conf (or whereever your apache configuration sits) change the "Logformat" option to the following:<p>LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %&#62;s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined<p>and then use option:<p>CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access_log combined<p>(or whatever log path you want).<p>edit: to be clear, I'm not saying that they're using google translate, just demonstrating that "It came from a google IP!" reveals approximately nothing.<p>edit2: it was pointed out in another thread that google is probably forwarding my user agent to the site that is being translated. This makes perfect sense (duh!) and closes the loop on the story. The scammers are using linux, which is consistent with both networks that they were seeing in their logs.

There's an interesting twist in this tale.<p>Have a look at: <a href="http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/#comment-488" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...</a><p>It says: "OMG!!!!! We received a call on the office line (the one listed on Mocality) from India stating that they were offering website services. I think the guy on phone was Deepak or something (it sounded almost like a scam) the guy said he was from Google Kenya blah blah, we refused the offer as we already have a site. Then few days ago I was just searching our page when I stumbled upon our site on .kbo.co.ke site…I mailed them n told them to take it down! aaaaaaaarg!!!!!!"<p>--- This is one of the small businesses contacted by 'Google'. SO it seems that after they got the call, they later saw their business website put up on kbo.co.ke (which is Google owned).<p>Doesn't this sound like further proof that this is Google sanctioned?

Google is precisely the brand that a non-Google third-party would use to launch a scam like this, so I'm going to wait a few hours before getting the flamethrower out. This really doesn't seem like Google's style from a <i>technical</i> quotient, even if you ignore the ethical angle.

If the statement about the Mountain View IP address is true then it's hard to imagine that these were scammers masquerading as Google.<p>My bet? Google's statement will blame some third party contractors or a miscommunication. Massive damage control and fire fighting for the rest of the day.

My guess is that these things are done by rogue Google employee or contractor. Hypothetical profit from this kind of behavior is not worth a tiny bit of potential reputation damage.

I'm eagerly awaiting a response from google on this. Frankly I suspect that these guys are not actually associated with Google. Google isn't the kind of company that would hire an army of employees to manually click through a website to cold call people.

Let's assume it was Google that did this, and let's assume that it was non-authorised behaviour by a branch office. (I hope for their sake this isn't the case, but there is more than enough evidence to make it possible)<p>What should Google do?<p>Obviously they shouldn't dodge the responsibility, but also they should try and repair the damage somehow.<p>What is an appropriate course of action for them? Paying damages? Transferring customers?<p>I can't think of any good options, really.

It seems this Google IP address was associated with a blog spam scanning bot some time ago: <a href="http://www.techjournal.info/2009/12/who-is-abuseiampromcorpgooglecom.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.techjournal.info/2009/12/who-is-abuseiampromcorpg...</a>

I have to admit, this is a little strange. I guess my main question is why does a company as large as Google need to solicit money from any business? Let alone Kenyan businesses well outside the scope of it's main customer base?

See also: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033</a>

Let's not jump the gun here. Let's keep the pitchforks at bay till we find out what's going on first.

There is another possibility here that I haven't seen mentioned yet:<p>Someone fraudulently representing Mocality attempted to start a joint Google-Mocality venture. Google was misled, and no one at Mocality was aware of the fraud, meaning neither party is guilty.

I would be interested in knowing what the browser client was set to in the HTTP GET request. That would be something to grab next time something like this happens.

The articles on the web are wrongly portraying Mocality as the little startup that could. Truth is, Mocality is a division of a 14 billion dollar media giant called Naspers. Not saying that Google is right or anything, but I think some people are getting fired up because they view this as a David vs. Goliath story, and it really isn't.

I can't help laughing at all the people jumping to conclusions, quoting the "don't be evil" mantra and so on. Why not wait a little bit until the fog clears up? Disappointing that boing boing also coins the phrase "Google's Kenyan ripoff", as if they were already certain of their guilt.<p>Will be interesting to see which news outlets will ride along with it for cheap thrills ("Goolge might be involved in a scam" etc). My guess is: most of them.

Here's the original post: <a href="http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...</a>

Lots of possibilities, but if Google isn't behind this then they should have been close enough to the local biz communities to have heard of it and stopped it

To be clear, I wouldn't consider the scraping of their data as a <i>ripoff</i>. Border-line unethical? May be. But far, far from a ripoff.<p>The ripoff can be if google was trying to use their name which would effectively be phishing. I don't see them really pushing hard on that accusation.

Bad google ....bad google!

Seems a little too clumsy for Google. I WILL say, though, that their PR handling of late makes them more vulnerable to this kind of BS. "Don't be evil" only works if you aren't, well, EVIL.

IP addresses are easy to spoof. Did Mocality try to figure out if it was really Google's IPs, or just someone faking them?