I just gave Froogle Google Product Search a try, and was surprised to find that it’s been overrun by scammers. It doesn’t have a seller verification system, so it’s only useful as a quick search for scam sellers. Plug in any popular consumer electronics product and sort by price, and Google will helpfully display a number of obvious scams.

A quick search for the Sony KDL-52XBR4 (their latest 52″ HDTV) turned up a few gems. They’re obvious: the whois records are days old, and after any attempt to order with a credit card they make an excuse and request a money order. Some of the frauds are even well documented.

What’s surprising about these shops, though, is that they’re fairly comprehensive. The perpetrators can’t come up with a believable brand (“Shopping Shop: Welcome to Our’s Shop”), but online store software has become advanced enough that it’s a fairly small endeavor to make an entire fake electronics shop. Choose your software, pick a template, throw in some stolen graphics, and then input the products– in the ideal case, you can automatically parse this information from another site and upload it to your store. It’s non-trivial, but a couple fake $1500 TVs will pay for the work in no time.

Google’s developing a reputation for shotgunning beta products, and shutting down Froogle is a good first step towards fighting that image. The quirks of some beta products are merely annoying: GMail remains quite usable, despite its infinite beta status. On the other hand, Froogle is helping to facilitate massive fraud. Shut it down until it’s ready for prime time.

UPDATE: I did a bit of digging around on other price comparison sites.  Most have a lot fewer money-order scammers, but are instead full of 5-star-rated fraudsters who will ship a foreign gray market product without telling you, send you products you didn’t order and charge you for them (then attempt to charge a restocking fee when you return them), and claim your product is out of stock if you refuse to buy their overpriced extras.  MySimon and PriceGrabber list the scammers alongside reputable merchants; EveryPrice.com specializes in listing only scammers.  It’s hard to tell if they intentionally manipulate their own rating systems to keep ratings for the rip-off artists inflated, or if employees from the “companies” manipulate them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.