On Tuesday, February 17, 2026, Brad Wetherall held an AMA on Sterling Sky’s subreddit. Disclaimer: The agency I worked for hired Brad to become their COO. I had switched from being a full-time employee to a contractor. I only had one interaction with Brad, and that was the meeting when I was advised that I needed to submit a proposal of my services and that I would only be employed for one or two months max. I ended my contract the next day. During Brad’s AMA stated he worked at Google on the GBP team and that he is the CEO of The GBP Experts. He neglected to mention that he is the COO for Esquire Digital.
I first met Brad at Brighton SEO in San Diego in November 2025. I sat in on his panel. He mentioned that Google has worked with government agencies to report bad actors so they can be investigated and prosecuted. Google has sued a few companies and individuals. In November 2022, Google sued G-verifier. They were the ones calling you to inform you that your Google Business Profile (GBP) would soon be unverified unless you paid them $99. There is at least one new scammer doing the same scam. GBP is free. Google sued scammers in June 2023 and in March 2025.
My question is, why is not more being done? In June 2019, the Wall Street Journal wrote about the personal injury lawyer spam flooding Google Maps. Mark Luckenbaugh was interviewed and admitted to spamming GBP. Were any actions ever taken? The only action occurred on Monday, February 17th, 2020, when Local Viking had several of its email accounts blacklisted. A blacklisted email account gets banned by Google, and all services associated with that email address get suspended. Their clients had their GBPs suspended. There have been no criminal charges or lawsuits.
These lawsuits don’t deter other bad actors enough. Maybe if there were more, then it would have the effect that I and others desire. Then maybe I wouldn’t be seeing the Garage Door The Home Service spam network flooding Google Maps. Years ago, I was talking with a friend about the penalties for engaging in fake reviews. He said that Google would only care if you got tons of fake reviews. The issue here is that while a business may have only a handful of GBPs that violate the TOS, others are creating tons of fake GBPs and/or renting them out. Some of these black hat SEOs love to flaunt their skills and promote themselves online. I am certain Google knows a lot of these people.
It might take the folks at Google getting upset enough to do something about it.
