Google mistakenly started handing out a reporter's cellphone number to people searching for Facebook tech support

If Facebook is broken for you in some way large or small, you can't call them to complain -- the company doesn't have a customer service number, it has a "support portal" for people suffering with the service, which combines the worst of autoresponders with the worst of underpaid, three-ring-binder constrained support staff to make a system that runs like a cost-conscious version of Kafka's "The Trial."

This means that literally millions of people are constantly searching for a support phone number for Facebook, and that's created chaos. On the one hand, you have the "Facebook tech support" scammers: we get hundreds of scammy Facebook support phone number submissions to our suggest-a-link form, and most of them seem to originate in India and to be meticulously, repeatedly hand-typed (based on our anti-fraud metrics that have totally, utterly failed to reduce the unstoppable flood of these submissions -- we also get floods of "Microsoft tech support" and "Amazon tech support" etc scam submissions).

Google gets lots of these queries, too (that's why the scammers are relentlessly trying to get posted here, so that Google will send these frustrated searchers to their fraudulent phone numbers). When Google gets lots of phone number queries, it tries to come up with an algorithmic solution: it looks for high-rated pages for the search term that also have recognizable phone numbers in their bodies, extracts the phone number and puts it in a "search box" at the top of the results page.

Enter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (previously), a top security reporter for Motherboard. Read the rest