There is this SEO scam going around where scammers are saying you pay Google to fix your rankings in Google Search. All you need to do is prepay them and Google will fix your site. John Mueller from Google said “this is a scam,” that Google does not offer such a service.
Eli Schwartz (no relation) posted about this scam on LinkedIn, he wrote, “The SEO version of the Advance Fee scam. Some small businesses believe they can pay Google “employees” to fix their visibility.”
He shared this screenshot of messages about this from the scammer:
John Mueller from Google responded saying:
This is a scam. There’s no team like this at Google that “works on it” to make a site rank better in search manually. Consider reporting these people to their payment provider or at least the local government. (I know most of y’all know this, but just to be really clear for everyone.)
This is probably super obvious to the average reader here but maybe someone will Google this to make sure this is a scam and this post will save them a few bucks.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.