A stranger can put a phone number on your Google listing

Open the Photos tab and count what you did not put there

Open your Google Business Profile and click the Photos tab. That profile is the free listing that puts you on Google Maps. Look at every picture you did not upload yourself and read any phone number printed on one of them, because if that number isn't yours, somebody else put it there on purpose, and your customers have been calling it.

This turned up on 10 September 2026. Barry Schwartz wrote it up at Search Engine Roundtable after Naomi Stevens, who does local search work, posted what she found on a listing she looks after. A Google Maps contributor had uploaded an image to that listing. The image carried the right business name. The phone number on it belonged to somebody else.

Two minutes on your own phone is the whole check. The rest of this post is why the door is open and what you do about it before the next call comes in.

How a stranger gets onto your listing, and how far it has spread

Google lets anyone with a Google account add photos to a business listing. That's the Maps contributor program, and it has been running for years. The point of it was that customers post the food, the waiting room, the finished driveway. Nobody on the business side signs off on those pictures before they go live.

So the door was already open. Stevens checked the account behind the photo she found. It had 150+ photo contributions to businesses it had nothing to do with, spread across the country, and the same wrong phone number showed up on images for other businesses too.

The picture itself was made with AI, which is why it holds up to a quick glance. Clean storefront, right name, nothing obviously off. Stevens says Google was showing it high on the profile, close to where a cover photo would sit. A customer scrolling on a phone has no reason to stop and wonder.

Then the call goes somewhere else. Schwartz put it plainly: the caller believes they are reaching the business, and instead "they are calling a scammer." Nothing rings on your end. No missed call, no voicemail, no new line in your phone log. You get a slow Tuesday and no way to explain it.

The person who answers that call now has your business name and a customer who trusts the listing enough to book. A dental office gets asked for a card number to hold an appointment. An HVAC customer gets quoted a price and a window. Whatever happens next, the person on the phone believes they dealt with you, and your name is the one attached to it.

Hold on to two numbers, both of them from 10 September 2026. Stevens counted 150+ photo contributions from the single account she looked up, and by the time Schwartz wrote the story he was putting the same pattern across "dozens, if not, hundreds" of Google Business Profile listings.

Take both numbers as a floor, since nobody has a full count yet. The account that reaches your listing has already worked through a long list of other businesses, and it didn't have to know anything about you to get there.

Reporting the photo is supposed to be the answer to this, and on paper it is. Stevens reported the image and wrote to Google support as well. The reply said, in part, "we're not sure of your exact issue." Schwartz read the whole pattern the same way: "The scammers are banking on Google's spam team not responding."

The scam scales because adding a photo takes a few seconds and a free Google account, and nothing about it is aimed at you in particular. A one-location practice with 40 reviews is the same amount of work as a chain. So the list of businesses hit is going to keep growing, and the businesses on it will keep being the ones who never open the Photos tab.

Why a wrong number costs more than it used to

A fake photo used to sit on one page and wait for somebody to scroll past it. Now the same profile gets read back out loud.

SOCi looked at nearly 350,000 business locations for its January 2026 report, and Search Engine Land covered it on 28 January. Business profile details came back about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and Perplexity. On Gemini it was 100%, because Gemini reads straight from Google Maps.

Whatever is printed on your Google profile is what a customer hears when they ask Gemini about you. A wrong number on a photo has a second route to the same customer, and that route is growing.

Those were January numbers (measured on companies with far more locations than yours, so read the percentages loosely), and the direction is the useful part. More of the people looking for a dentist or a plumber now ask a question and read one answer instead of comparing five listings. That one answer is built out of what Google already holds about you. A customer who never opens Maps at all can still end up with a number that came off a photo a stranger uploaded.

What to do today

Three steps, and none of them needs your web person.

1. Report every photo you didn't upload. Open the picture on your profile and use the report option. Google's help page for removing customer photos says an owner can ask for removal when a picture breaks the content rules, including pictures that are spammy or misleading. A phone number that belongs to someone else fits. Give Google the specific reason in plain words, since Stevens got a vague answer back when the issue was left broad. The review takes several business days, and a photo won't come down just because you dislike it.
2. Read the phone number at the top of your profile. This is a different field from the photos, and it can be wrong on its own. Call it from your cell phone (I put it on speaker so I can hear whether it even rings) and let it ring through to whoever picks up in your office.
3. Put the Photos tab on a weekly reminder. Friday afternoon, two minutes. Weekly is more often than most owners will need (I don't have a number that tells you the right interval, and neither does anyone else), but it's two minutes. The account that got in once is still out there, so the fix is only good until the next upload.

While you are in there, check your hours and your address the same way. Anything a customer acts on straight off the listing is worth reading once a week, because a wrong detail on that page now travels into an AI answer as easily as it travels into a phone call.

I can't tell you how long Google takes to act on a report, and anyone who quotes you a number is guessing. Stevens reported hers and was still waiting when the story ran. What you control is the checking. An owner who looks every Friday catches a bad photo within a week. Nobody else is going to tell you it is there.