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Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

133 points by iharris 12y ago

Background: My wife works as an administrator at a Canadian cosmetic surgery clinic. The physician, Dr. C., is quite successful and is ranked #1 in our city on sites like RateMD. Yesterday, she was cold-called by an SEO startup in an attempt to sell her a revamped website and SEO services. He said they had already designed a placeholder website, and that he would personalize it for them if the clinic would purchase their services. She politely refused. Out of curiosity, her colleague, J, called the phone number on this fictional web site. J pretended to be a potential client and asked to schedule a consultation. The other party said "The doctor is currently busy; I'll check with him and call you back." J asked which physician she would be seeing. He gave her the name of Dr. C (the physician at J's clinic!) along with his background and credentials (gleaned from the bio on Dr. C's website). When pressed for the clinic's location, they gave J a (fake) address in Chinatown. My wife then called the SEO company to complain that they seemed to be impersonating a legitimate clinic in order to sell SEO services (she did not mention J's call). The person she spoke to (listed as one of co-founders) became very rude. He denied that they were doing anything wrong and huffed that "If you don't want to grow your Web presence then we don't want your business!" I believe that this is an attempted "growth hack" and not an outright scam, but they are taking it too far. Using a real physician's identity, even in a placeholder website, can damage his reputation, not to mention displacing him as #1 in Google search results for our city. HN, do you have any thoughts on what action my wife can take to stop this behavior? Update 1: Interestingly, the fake clinic domain name is VERY similar (one letter difference) to another, legitimate clinic in the city. Update 2: Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons is in contact with wife's clinic. Preparing to unleash the hounds, no doubt.

myself248 12y ago
1: Lawyer. 2: Physicians' professional board may have advice. 3: Document the crap out of everything. When these scumbags hang, I want to read about it in the Globe and Mail.
mtmail 12y ago
The company might do that to other people as well. Even if you find only 2-3 other people then a judge would see it as systematic fraud with higher penalties. I just hope the SEO company isn't hiding in another country.
shiftpgdn 12y ago
This is a pretty normal offshore scam these days. File a proper DMCA/phishing complaint with their hosting provider & Google. File a phishing complaint with their upstream phone provider. All their shady SEO tactics will get them de-ranked in a few weeks regardless of what you do so it's only a short term problem.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  It appears to not be off-shore but Canadian local (Montreal).
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Can you use DMCA for non copyright issues? Also, DMCA is a US thing, does it apply in Canada?
dmschulman 12y ago
SEO companies, especially the shady ones in my experience, like to be particularly litigious. Is there an equivalent of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in Canada? Contacting the BBB and filing a claim is definitely a way to get some momentum, lots of businesses in the USA at least depend on having a good, clean BBB rating.
- iharris 12y ago
  The BBB does operate in Canada; we checked and this company isn't listed, unfortunately.
  - giarc 12y ago
    Consult the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and see what they say.
- bhartzer 12y ago
  This is not a true SEO company. Honest SEO firms that deal with organic/natural search engine rankings wouldn't do such a thing. It's a shame that companies like this give the honest SEO firms a bad rep. Did the company in question ever say that they were an SEO firm in their sales pitch or just an online marketing agency? Personally, I would contact the medical board, see a lawyer about what the doctor's rights are, and file a UDRP domain dispute to get ahold of that domain name.
- bhartzer 12y ago
  There is a very important distinction here. The original post says that they were called by an "SEO Startup". That, in fact, is untrue. The firm who called the doctor here was NOT an SEO startup, according to their website they're a "web advertising" company. There is a big difference between a company that's a web advertising company and an SEO company or SEO firm. Lots of agencies do SEO and web advertising, but to put a blanket statement out there that this was an SEO firm (meaning Search Engine Optimization firm interested in getting organic/natural traffic to a site) is wrong. This shady company is a web advertising company, who put up a false/misleading website on a misleading domain name. It doesn't sound like their intention was to do SEO. They make money by charging the doctor or clinic for the website and they "maybe" get some local listing, perhaps do PPC. But typically a company like this doesn't have the expertise or knowledge (or care) to do real SEO (which requires real content and link earning). Don't get me wrong, what the company did here was false, misleading, and punishable. But to put a blanket statement out there and assume that this was an "SEO firm" or "SEO startup" is just flat out wrong. This original post should say that the doctor was contacted by an "agency" and not an "SEO startup".
davismwfl 12y ago
Your wife (or someone) should report it to the professional license/medical board, basically whomever handles licensing and advertising for professionals in Canada. Not even so much to attack the SEO company, but to protect the Physician should a complaint ever be lodged against him/her. Doing so will likely also start an investigation though, so it will work out. You may be right that the SEO company is trying to do a growth hack, but that doesn't alleviate them of the responsibility to not break the law. In the US you can get into some decent trouble doing that crap. You might get away with it once or twice claiming ignorance to the standards on registered professionals in a state but I doubt you get away with it long once someone reports you. Also, I personally wouldn't name anyone publicly here, it just doesn't seem like a good idea. However, sending an email to the SEO company seems reasonable.
varsketiz 12y ago
I remember meeting some French guys in one of SF's startup accelerators who had a similar startup - to create websites for small businesses from crawled data and do serious SEO for these websites, then once customers inquiry or try to register for appointments online or whatnot, they would send the original business an email saying something along the lines of "claim your website - you have customers waiting". While it definitely seems to be in a gray area - it does sound like a decent idea... Could someone with a legal background comment on the legality of this?
- hdevalence 12y ago
  It does not sound like a decent idea. 'Decent' is not a word that fits with 'deceptive practices', 'impersonation', or 'extortion'.
  - varsketiz 12y ago
    Well, sorry for choosing a word you don't agree with. I could have chosen "interesting" instead of decent - it does not change my point. "'deceptive practices', 'impersonation', or 'extortion'" - this, however, is your interpretation and it is taking it pretty far. 'deceptive practices' - that I can agree with. No matter how you do it, it is deceptive. Then again, a lot of businesses were built with (oh, say Airbnb or Youtube) / use (every cheap airline website) shady practices. 'impersonation' - does not have to be. What if they clearly list that this is not an official X site? If your data is public and crawlable, is it illegal for people to use that information? 'extortion' - does not have to be. Isn't this an equivalent of going to the same business and saying, I did a bit of research on you, then I told 3 people about you and they would love to buy your services. I'll refer them to you if you give me $5. Is this illegal?
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      If you're being clear that you're just gonna be attempting to relay info, then you're probably OK. The issue is that you'd discover it to be more profitable to lie, and pretend you're the actual business. That way, you're holding their reputation hostage. If they don't pay, those customers feel that the real company just ignored them. It's not a terrible idea for targeting SMBs that don't have a website, so long you aren't misrepresenting things.
johnsonmkj 12y ago
Do everything that everyone else here has stated, but also watch out for other things that they might fraudulently claim: - Local listings - make sure that the Google local listing, and other local directories are showing the correct information, and that they didn't try to change this - Social media accounts - What the scammy company would sell as "reputation management." Verify that they are not creating accounts on all of the big social media sites.
wesleytodd 12y ago
Agreed that you should have your lawyer contact them with a threatening email. Also, you could have a friend "hire" them for some small service just to get their information. Then provide that to your lawyer to pursue more substantial legal measures. <rant> My experience with SEO companies has been horrible. I worked for one for a month, have worked with them in the past at agencies I have worked at, and was given a list of "optimizations" from one a the startup I currently work for. My experience while working for one is, by far, the worst. The owner/CEO asked me to lie to a customer and tell them I did work that he had actually outsourced to India. "In the future, try to funnel these things through you. Instead of saying, 'I will pass that on to the developer', say, 'I will take care of that'". I feel like their skills are hard to quantify, and because of this a lot of people get sucked in on questionable sales pitches. This market then seems to draw the "Snake Oil" type salesmen who find they can get easy money. Although there are good people offering quality SEO services, I have had 100% bad experiences with them. </rant>
- BrainInAJar 12y ago
  SEO, as an industry, is shysters. Even "good" SEO is still a service designed to break search engines. A scummy industry is going to attract scummy people, it just becomes a question of to what degree they are scummy.
  - sharkweek 12y ago
    No, good SEO is designing a page that is perfectly crawlable by bots (this is still difficult for most people, especially for larger websites and people who aren't familiar with webmaster best practices), and researching/creating/promoting relevant content to attract links. There are of course shady people in the SEO world, but most of the "one cool trick to help you rank better" tactics are long gone as Google has done a pretty good job squashing those through algo updates. Saying "SEO is still a service to break search engines" is incredibly misguided - Organic search is a ridiculously powerful growth opportunity for brands as ranking #1 for proper keywords can be a multimillion dollar marketing value add. To sell that short is incredibly foolish, and every brand worth their weight should truly believe they deserve to rank #1 for relevant terms, why not work to achieve this?
iharris 12y ago
Some good advice so far; thanks, everyone! My wife is in contact with the College of Physicians and Surgeons to keep them abreast of the situation. We'll see if she can engage their lawyers. She's also documenting everything as it has happened. I did a little bit of snooping through WHOIS records. I think the SEO company is based in Montreal so we might be able to do something domestically about it.
readme 12y ago
You need to talk to a lawyer. It's extremely likely the law protects him on this matter.
sologoub 12y ago
I've been seeing a good number of google maps listings hijacked by marketing companies. One restaurant a co-worker of mine advises in her spare time contracted a company that provides online food delivery lead gen. services (similar to grubhub, but not them). They take a cut of every order. The restaurant owner is a friend of my co-worker and asked her to help with their website and local marketing to drive more business in addition to the lead gen company. When she dug into it, turns out the lead gen business conned the hostess into turning over the google maps account via the phone verification and everyone that looked up the restaurant in google to order went through the lead gen service, where they should have gone directly to the restaurant, saving the restaurant the lead gen commission. While one might argue that this is legitimate, the owner of the restaurant had no idea and felt cheated.
fleitz 12y ago
Talk to a lawyer, practicing medicine with out a license comes immediately to mind. It looks like it might be covered under identity fraud: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=0fb44a19-fdad-49a6-aa60-4caf943c8040 http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.... May want to reach out to your local prosecutor and avoid those legal fees :) Section 403 CCC: 403. (1) Everyone commits an offence who fraudulently personates another person, living or dead, (a) with intent to gain advantage for themselves or another person; (b) with intent to obtain any property or an interest in any property; (c) with intent to cause disadvantage to the person being personated or another person; or (d) with intent to avoid arrest or prosecution or to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice. Clarification (2) For the purposes of subsection (1), personating a person includes pretending to be the person or using the person’s identity information — whether by itself or in combination with identity information pertaining to any person — as if it pertains to the person using it. Punishment (3) Everyone who commits an offence under subsection (1) (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than 10 years; or (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
malexw 12y ago
This is the second time now that I've seen this come up with somebody impersonating a doctor in Canada. Someone created a fake Twitter account and website for a Dr. O that I know. Can I connect you with Dr. O in case these two incidents are related?
- iharris 12y ago
  Absolutely - I sent a brief e-mail to the address in your bio. Thanks!
rcfox 12y ago
Interesting... Recently my friend noticed a fake Twitter account under her father's name. He's also doctor in Toronto. The Twitter account is just repeating a Wordpress site's RSS feed. On that site, there's a link to <his-name>.info, which according to a whois lookup was registered by someone at the "International Association of Healthcare Professionals" in New York. Google searches for that association reveal doubts of legitimacy[0] and scam warnings[1][2]. I haven't spoken to my friend or her father about it directly (I just noticed a tweet the other day) so I don't know if he was contacted about establishing a web presence or anything. [0] http://www.quackwatch.com/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecorg.html http://www.quackwatch.com/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecorg.html [1] http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/The-International-Association-of-Healthcare-Professionals/New-York-New-York-10022/The-International-Association-of-Healthcare-Professionals-Scam-artists-stole-my-80795-c-1164526 http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/The-International-Association-... [2] http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-877-447-8360 http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-877-447-8360
raverbashing 12y ago
Impersonation is a criminal matter. This might be a matter for the police, especially if the SEO company is in Canada.
logn 12y ago
> Interestingly, the fake clinic domain name is VERY similar (one letter difference) to another, legitimate clinic in the city. Contact the organization administering the top level domain and file a typo squatting dispute. Also, most likely these SEO people will stop impersonating the doctor's office when it's clear they won't win the account (edit: they'll start impersonating a different doctor). Their mistake was picking up the phone call. It's common practice and arguably ethical to set up and optimize a placeholder site. Any pre-launch website with a link to sign up is doing exactly this.
JeremyMorgan 12y ago
This is exactly why I got out of SEO services. I always did quality, white hat, and ethical work and had a lot of great customers for a long time, and they started getting eaten up by these idiots. Basically the story would be: 1. I perform work for customer, they're satisfied. They would show improvement and start getting more traffic. 2. Some scam company company calls them and appeals to their sense of greed. 3. They tell me they're going with the new company who erases everything I did. 4. Six months or so later they call me back because things are worse and want me to fix it. 5. I refuse because now they're deep in black hat territory, and either deranked by Google or well on their way. Or they'd have some strange legal issues popping up from the crap the other company did. So yeah, after a while I jumped out of the business. I know that isn't exactly relevant to your problem, but these companies are just complete scumbags in every sense of the word, and anything you can do to damage them, you should. Call a lawyer, and protect your good name. Take a chunk out of the bad guys.
- jasonsync 12y ago
  No matter how good the SEO ... someone will always tell your client it's horrible. And "prove it" with an SEO report card. And then no matter how much good you did, your client will always have that thought in the back of their mind that maybe it could be better. Little do they realize it could be a lot worse. Here's some of the crazy I see far too often: - SEO guys that run paid traffic through their client's affiliate programs, to generate commission on top of the regular fees they charge. - SEO guys that offer a short-term contract initially to reel clients in, use the initial fees to actually purchase products from said client's website, and then use perceived increase in performance and revenue to get a long-term contract paid up front, and then disappear. - SEO guys that charge for plagiarized blog content. - SEO guys that convince clients to pay thousands of dollars to add "meta keywords" tags. - SEO guys that rewrite click farm traffic to make it look organic. - SEO guys that install "backdoors" on their client's hosting accounts to continue monetizing the website via backlinks long after they've been "fired". - SEO guys that hold businesses hostage with duplicate websites (similar to this story). - SEO guys with english-as-a-second-language, that charge for "Content Marketing" - SEO guys that charge their clients thousands of dollars to setup and maintain Facebook, Twitter, a Blog, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, then do nothing on them for years and hold their clients hostage for additional fees when said clients realize they're not getting their money's worth and want account access. - SEO guys that register the domain name and hosting on the "clients behalf"
davemel37 12y ago
I sympathize with OP but want to make Two corrections - 1. It wasn't an SEO company, it was a Scam Artist impersonating an SEO company... let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. 2. It wasn't an attempted growth hack. It is a racket and should be called that. In fact, every growth hacker out there will insist that "putting users first" and "creating a sticky product" is growth hacking...not scamming people.
curiously 12y ago
Oh boy. Let the ass whooping begin.
jwinskowski 12y ago
There is a difference between an "SEO Company" and an "Extortion Company." This is an example of the latter. Those suckers are being blatantly deceptive and deserve to be approached with appropriate legal action. Sickening.
loceng 12y ago
Who's the company?
curiously 12y ago
An even worse form of such practices are sites that basically crawl yelp or yellowpages and then proceed to spam and call small businesses with the lure of 'claim your profile and get customers', when all it really is just emails from unqualified people submitting their contact information through the main site and randomly getting matched. This startup company has ton of bad consumer reports, I'm glad that I ended up not working on their website. I would've had trouble sleeping had I seen what their website was actually doing, ripping off small businesses with fake leads.
thelostagency 12y ago
hahahaha yeah not really ethical and not something most SEO's would do
ohyeshedid 12y ago
The physician has a lawyer. The lawyer needs to send a DMCA notice to whoever is hosting the fake site, be it server reseller or webhost, then have the lawyer send Google[1] a DMCA takedown request. It should resolve itself quickly as technically it could be reported as phishing. Google DMCA Information: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420?rd=2 https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420?rd=2

wesleytodd 12y ago

@sharkweek The problem here is that SEO companies are usually not equipped to solve those problems. Their developers are usually secondary roles in the company, and might even be second-rate themselves. Also, good/real SEO usually requires content writers. Which is an ongoing process, and is probably not worth the cost to most small businesses.

sharkweek 12y ago
I should clarify by saying I wouldn't bother hiring an SEO agency anymore - definitely not worth their billable rates. BUT, if I were a smaller company growing a marketing team I would definitely look for someone with a legitimate understanding of this as a marketing tactic, it's getting better but it is still the wild west in a lot of ways as well, so at least being able to monitor and interpret what is going on is ridiculously important. And if I'm a bigger company, I would hire at least two strict SEOs, one technical, one content.
- wesleytodd 12y ago
  Yeah, that is probably a good suggestions. But in relation to a small doctors office as in the OP's case, probably not worth doing anything beyond getting a decent front-end developer to make a brochure site.
- iharris 12y ago
  Totally agree with you. In the case of this clinic, they get almost all of their referrals by word-of-mouth these days. However, they've noted that the new generation of twentysomethings will generally do their homework on Google before calling in. Might be useful for the clinic to prepare for the eventual shift to millennials as their primary clientele. With that said, most of the SEO companies that cold-call them are quite shady. Other clinics in the city have had their search rankings drop after hiring SEO services who use scummy tactics. The new "snake oil" perhaps?
normloman 12y ago
If all they do is write interesting content and promote it, why do we call it SEO? Last time I checked, that matches the job description of public relations writer.
- stan_rogers 12y ago
  It goes a little beyond content writing. At a certain level of resolution, SEO (the good stuff) and accessibility become nearly indistinguishable as well. So yes, there is a sense in which "real" SEO is merely a matter of writing web pages that give your users what they want with optimal markup, and SEO is probably a bad name for it - except that the people who need it are usually going to be searching for ways of getting good search results rather than advice on how to build more informative, accessible web pages.
  - normloman 12y ago
    I worked as an SEO for years. Quit because of this. "Good" SEO is about good content, good coding, and good usability. But in order to do that, you need great designers and writers. SEO people tended to be neither. My colleagues got into the industry by keyword stuffing and link farming. They were trying, unsuccessfully, to change their specialty after updates to Google's algorithm. We helped sites get ranked, but most of our clients would see a better return on investment hiring designers and writers. You touched on the other issue: Even if all you do is write and design, by calling yourself SEO, you're attracting clients narrowly focused on their search ranking. That's the metric they're going to judge your performance on, and it won't matter how accessible you make their site if they don't get the #1 spot for "cosmetic dentistry allentown pa." So by selling SEO, you miss an opportunity to educate clients on creating a memorable user experience.
- freebs 12y ago
  You can make 100 landing pages with interesting content on them, but if they are using words that people don't use when searching, they are less likely to be surfaced at the top of the results. Those pages can be scattered across the site architect and have improper linking. They can have improper titles, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. Often times writers can't grasp these things, or they are so overworked with pumping out content that they simply don't have the time for them. SEOs can be more technical, and can also make changes across a large site or networks of sites. EG: Missing the city and state from the h1 of every vehicle landing page for hundreds or thousands of vehicles on a thousand dealership sites can have a dramatic impact. In this sense many SEOs also have the skills to be what we now call Content Strategists. People that do research, plan, and keep the content teams moving in the right direction.