Anyone Can Steal Your Clients Using AI (Here's How)

Someone can steal leads from your Google Maps listing without changing your phone number, your website, or anything inside your Google Business Profile. This is how they're doing it. So, here's a real roofing company. Now, someone uploaded this photo to its map listing. The business name is correct, but the phone number in the image isn't the

business's. And because this is a user-uploaded photo, it shows up right alongside all the legitimate photos from this business. In this case, it was sitting so high in the photo feed that it almost looked like the cover image. Search Engine Roundtable reported on this in September of '26. They found the same contributor had uploaded more than

150 photos to unrelated businesses around the country, all using the same phone number. And this works for a pretty simple reason. Most customers aren't carefully checking every part of a Google Business Profile. They see the business. They see a phone number in a photo, and then they call it. Meanwhile, the real number is still sitting right

there on the listing. So, the business can be ranking perfectly well, can have a fabulous review profile that converts, and still lose the call. Now, fake phone numbers in Maps photos aren't new, but what's different here is the scale. One account was uploading AI-generated images to businesses all over the country with the same number on them.

The businesses reported the image and contacted Google Support. Google sent back one of those generic emails saying they weren't sure what the issue was, and pointing them toward a bunch of common support articles. If you've ever contacted Google Support, you're probably familiar with that email. But none of these articles actually solved the problem, which was somebody putting