A Washington DC restaurant owner has launched a lawsuit against the tech giant for an incorrect Google Maps listing which lead to a decline in customers and forced the administration to lay off staff and finally shut down.


The 40-year-old Serbian Crown restaurant was known for its exotic meats, including lion, but suddenly suffered a 75% drop in customers over the weekend two years ago. The owner, an Italian immigrant Rene Bertagna, had to lay off staff and eventually close the restaurant in a few months. He had no idea what could cause such a decline, because he was unaware of his Google Maps listing until one day, when a regular customer called his and asked why they are closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

It turned out that the Google Maps listing had falsely shown the restaurant shut over the weekend and Monday, which used to be the restaurant’s busiest days and kept it profitable.

The owner blames the tech giant for allowing the listing for the Serbian Crown to be sabotaged and failing to do enough to verify the changes. Bertagna launched a lawsuit against Google in Virginia federal court, claiming that he had never used the Internet or Google Maps. Although he finally hired an Internet consultant who took control of the Google Places listing and corrected the information about the restaurant, it was too late and he couldn’t save his business.

In fact, this isn’t the first time Google Maps listings were sabotaged. For instance, it is known that thousands of hotel listings were also hijacked six months ago, changing their listings to point to an external website. The matter is that anyone with a Google+ account is able to submit a change to any detail of a Google+ Local page, be it a listed website address, phone number, physical address or name of the place. Google claims that all the changes are submitted for review before the real changes are made, but that was not enough to stop abuse in the past.

Business listings are created using commercial mailing list databases, after which businesses can claim a listing and curate it for free. But if a business ignores it, users are able to change its details without the place’s knowledge. That’s what happened with Serbian Crown.

Legal experts believe that the lawsuit is unlikely to result in any impact on Google due to the crowdsourced nature of Google Maps. Google’s lawyer claimed that the restaurant “should not be permitted to vex the company or the court with such meritless claims”, in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.