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Comment by samlev | Hacker News Reader

There's a couple of reasons why I think this doesn't seem quite right:

- "Large human effort" doesn't seem like Google's style - a screen scrape for info would be faster for them, and I'd assume that they already have tools built to do that.

- If the callers are lying about being affiliated with mocality, then why can't we assume that they might also be lying about being from Google?

- Google would likely have the entire site indexed and cached already, so there's very little reason for them to get actual people to manually screen-scrape the live site.

- OK, the second wave is coming from a Google IP, but why wasn't the first wave coming from one?

Yeah, it looks pretty bad, but this type of behaviour is so atypical of Google. It seems almost laughable to make the assumption that it's anything other than scammers trying to take advantage of Google announcements to try to make a quick/easy buck by selling Google services as an affiliate.

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I'm also very curious what services the callers were offering. Are they services Google offers? Services Google charges for?

Ok, after reading over this transcript, it's clearly a scam unrelated to Google: http://blog.mocality.co.ke/files/2012/01/Incoming_Call-Redac...

1. Google doesn't offer website creation. 2. Google doesn't charge for low-traffic hosting. 3. Google wouldn't setup your website via email.

They do. With partners. It's "Getting Kenyan businesses online": http://www.kbo.co.ke/

They've done a similar action in France few months ago.

The guys who said coming from Google were probably a partner of the operation.

But they're not offering to create websites for businesses - they're just offering the tools and making it easy for businesses to create their own websites.

There is much in that transcript which is inconsistent and even contradictory to any available information on the "Getting Kenyan Businesses online" site.

Yes, exactly. It's called Google Business SiteBuilder. Perhaps the company calling is using this tool to build Kenyans' sites, then charging for it?

I'm assuming that they're offering google apps, which you can sell as an affiliate (naming your price). But reading through the transcript, and listening to the calls, they claim to be offering to "develop" a web site for the business, which I very much doubt google would ever do.

They have tools in google apps for making pages/simple sites, but everything about the call stinks of scam.

> Caller: Twenty one days. We're going to develop the website within twenty one days

When has google ever "developed websites" for independent companies?

  Caller: XXXXX, and do you have a gmai account?*
  Business owner: yes, I do have a gmail account.
  Caller: Kindly give me your gmail account.
  ...
  Caller: ... you will be given a personal password which you can use to log in and make changes in case you want to.
  ...
  Caller: ... For photos, I will give you my gmail account so you can forward to me either the business logo or the photos you feel have nice looking clothes that can attract customers.

Yes, I've cherry-picked some of the transcript, but the point is that these are practices which aren't just against Google's "Do no evil" policy, but would be counter to how they would actually run. For a company like google, with their existing infrastructure, this would just be bad business.

Also, why ask for a gmail username, and then say later "Well we'll send you a username and password once we're done". It doesn't make any sense.

Oh well, I assume that at some point, Google will be forced to respond, will give a big "What the hell, guys, this wasn't us", and then everyone will look sheepish for a while until a year later where some blogger will stumble on it again, and try to expose the truth of "google being evil in africa".

Just a pedantic nit; Google's code of conduct catchphrase is not "do no evil", it's "don't be evil".

And I suspect they aren't, as a company. Even though these were Google employees, as Google has admitted, I doubt they were acting in accordance with anyone sufficiently high up in the corporate hierarchy.

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