A Disabled Veteran Business Owner's Battle With Google

By Anthony M. Piccone, Owner and Founder, 7th Level Mortgage LLC, NMLS #1003861

I am a 100 percent disabled veteran. I am also the owner of a mortgage company licensed in six states, and I am writing this because Google, a company no one elected and no regulator in any of my six states oversees, has the power to make my business invisible, and is using it by accident, on autopilot, without a single human being willing to look at the file.

My company, 7th Level Mortgage LLC, is headquartered in Waterford Works, New Jersey. I live and work in Florida, the way a great many veteran business owners now run companies across state lines. Like every local business in America, we live or die on our Google Business Profile. It is where customers find us, where our 46 reviews and 4.5 star rating sit, and where half the internet's directories take their cues from. Google will not verify ours, and everything else in this story flows from that one fact.

Google offers exactly one path to verification in my case: a video, filmed at the premises, uploaded from my Google account, on my phone. I am in Florida. The premises are in New Jersey. No employee may submit the video in my place, because the system accepts the upload only from the account holder's own account and device. My staff member in the New Jersey office, a woman named Tracy, recorded the premises on her phone and sent me the footage. I played it on my monitor and re-recorded it on my own phone, because that was the only route Google's restrictions left open, and I uploaded it. Google rejected it, in September, without identifying a single requirement it had failed. A genuine recording of a real office was degraded into a recording of a screen by Google's own rules, and then rejected by Google for looking like one.

Having said all of that, the video is not even the worst part. The worst part is what happened when I did everything else they asked. I narrowed my service areas from whole states to individual cities, exactly as instructed. I provided photographs of the storefront and its permanent signage. I answered their questions about how customers reach us. Google's own support representative then wrote to me, on October 7, thanking me for updating the service areas and providing the photos, and in the same breath pointed me back to the same impossible video, while Google's messages warned me that too many failed attempts could cause even that option to be withdrawn. Comply, and be sent in a circle. Decline, and stay invisible. Attempt and fail too many times, and lose the door entirely.

On October 8, I stopped asking and served notice. My legal notice to Google, with a formal litigation hold on every record in the case, went to their legal department and their support team together. On October 9, Google acknowledged it in writing, the notice, the hold, all of it, recorded in their system. On October 11, their system sent me a satisfaction survey, the kind that begins by hoping they were able to resolve my problem. Nothing had been resolved. No supervisor ever answered my written request for one. The case was not closed because it was finished. It was closed because closing cases is what the system does.

I do not believe my file is special, and that is precisely why I am writing. Nothing in this process was personal or improvised. The notices are form generated, the verification channel is standardized, the attempt warning is scripted, and the closure was automatic. Which means the same wall stands in front of every business owner in America who cannot personally appear at the listed premises holding the account phone: the remote owner, the owner of locations in three states, the estate settling a father's shop, the licensed professional serving a region from one office. We are not a rounding error. In a country that tells its veterans to go build businesses, we are a significant share of the people who did.

Here is what I am asking for, and it is not complicated. Verify businesses the way every regulator in my six states already does: with documents. My license is a public record. My corporate filings are public records. My storefront photographs are in Google's own file, acknowledged by Google's own representative. A system that can read a license plate in a photograph can read a mortgage license in a database. The technology is not the obstacle. The obstacle is that no one at Google owns the outcome when the automated answer is wrong.

So the fight has moved to the rooms where someone does own outcomes. A second notice is served, with a deadline of October 22. Complaints are filed with the Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General. Class action counsel is evaluating the case, because a standardized process that produces the same injury in every state is what class actions exist for. Every listing organization carrying my company's information has been told, in writing, to stop copying Google and verify independently, by November 2, or be named alongside Google in the suit. And members of Congress in both parties have the file, including a senator who sued Google three times as a state attorney general and won.

I would rather be writing about mortgages. But a veteran who cannot be found by his own customers, in the country he served, because a form letter outranks a licensing record, has a story worth telling until it is fixed. If you own a business and you have hit this same wall, you are not alone, and I would like to hear from you. Our records, together, are the case.

Anthony M. Piccone Owner and Founder, 7th Level Mortgage LLC, NMLS #1003861 Waterford Works, New Jersey