Tony Wang9 min readOne Phone Number Connects 26,383 Google Maps Listings. The Company Was Liquidated in 2024.
Six phone numbers account for 166,191 US Google Maps listings. The phone field is a fingerprint: it finds whole networks of machines, and one dead chain.
Most of a Google Maps listing is unique to one business. The phone number usually is too — and that is precisely what makes the exceptions worth looking at.
Across 15,865,904 US listings carrying a phone, there are roughly 12,423,676 distinct numbers: a mean of 1.277 listings per number. Sharing a phone with thousands of other listings is not normal behaviour. So we sorted by it.
The fourteen busiest numbers on the American map
| Number | Listings | Listing title | Primary category |
|---|---|---|---|
| +1 800-463-3339 | 38,145 | FedEx Drop Box | mailing_service |
| +1 800-511-8940 | 33,974 | LibertyX Bitcoin ATM | atm |
| +1 800-275-8777 | 30,979 | United States Postal Service | post_office |
| +1 866-733-2693 | 26,383 | Redbox | movie_rental_kiosk |
| +1 888-758-4389 | 20,689 | ChargePoint Charging Station | electric_vehicle_charging_station |
| +1 800-928-2274 | 16,021 | Coinstar Kiosk | money_transfer_service |
| +1 800-742-5877 | 7,533 | UPS Access Point location | shipping_and_mailing_service |
| +1 702-900-2037 | 6,995 | Coinhub Bitcoin ATM Teller | atm |
| +1 800-627-3999 | 6,986 | Citibank ATM | atm |
| +1 888-998-2546 | 6,543 | Blink Charging Station | electric_vehicle_charging_station |
| +1 877-346-6244 | 6,469 | Amazon Locker | mailing_service |
| +1 833-600-0406 | 6,156 | Walmart Home Services | landscaper |
| +1 800-746-7287 | 6,153 | MoneyGram | money_transfer_service |
| +1 844-235-7466 | 6,031 | Primo Water Exchange | bottled_water_supplier |
Two of these decode to published vanity lines — 1-800-GoFedEx and 1-800-ASK-USPS, both matching the numbers each company lists on its own contact page. The rest were confirmed by title and domain.
Almost none of them are businesses in any ordinary sense
Roll up the 40 most-shared numbers by primary category and the map's idea of a "business" gets very broad:
Every large category here is an unattended machine: a box that dispenses cash, accepts a parcel, charges a car or takes coins. They have a phone number because a corporation gave all of them the same one, and they appear on the map because they are places you can go — which is a reasonable thing for a map to record, and a misleading thing to count as a business.
The 26,383 listings for a company that no longer exists
The fourth-largest cluster is the interesting one. +1 866-733-2693 connects 26,383 listings, all titled "Redbox" — the DVD kiosks that stood outside supermarkets and pharmacies for two decades.
Redbox does not exist. Its parent, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, converted its bankruptcy to a Chapter 7 liquidation in July 2024, and roughly 24,000 kiosks were shut down, with retailers left to remove the machines at their own cost. That was two years ago.
The listings are still here. And this is the part worth being precise about, because the obvious accusation would be wrong: Google knows. Pull one of those listings up by its place ID and the Maps page says so plainly:
That is the actual finding, and it is a limitation of the data rather than an error in it. A dataset of business listings that does not model closure represents a liquidated DVD kiosk and a working bakery identically. Every count drawn from it — including the 20,047,014 at the top of this post, and the counts in our own earlier studies — includes an unknown number of businesses that have stopped existing.
The shared phone number is what makes that visible. One dead company is invisible among 20 million rows; 26,383 rows sharing a single number is not.
The listings that have already vanished
The fingerprint catches a second pattern that looks nothing like a machine network. +1 844-235-7466 connects 4,644 listings titled "Passport photos by PhotoAiD" — an online service that produces compliant passport photos from a phone camera, holding thousands of individual map pins across the country.
Two things stand out. 91.2% of those 4,644 listings show exactly 7 reviews, which is not what per-location review counts look like; genuine location-level counts spread out, as Redbox's do (62.1% at one review, then a tail). And when we asked Google for eight of them by place ID — sampled across New York, Texas and California — none resolved. The same check returned normal results for Redbox and LibertyX listings, so it is not a broken tool.
The most likely reading is that these listings existed, were captured, and have since been removed. We can't confirm the reason, and won't guess at one. What we can say is that a spot-check of eight found eight gone, and that our snapshot still contains all 4,644.
Why this matters if you count businesses
Three practical consequences, in rough order of how much money they could cost someone:
- "Number of businesses" from map data is an overcount, and not by a knowable amount. Machines, drop boxes and closed chains are all in there. Filtering non-business categories — as our contact-channel census did, removing 2.8 million listings — helps, but a Redbox kiosk is categorised
movie_rental_kiosk, which reads like a real retail category. - A shared phone number is a cheap, strong network detector. One
termsaggregation on the phone field surfaces every large corporate estate on the map, without any brand list to check against. It found FedEx, USPS, UPS, Amazon, Walmart, Citi, ChargePoint, Blink, Coinstar, MoneyGram and Primo Water in a single query. - Uniform review counts are a signal worth checking. 91.2% of listings at exactly seven reviews is a property of how the listing was created, not of what customers did.
What it means
A phone number is metadata that businesses reuse and datasets rarely index on. Sorting 20 million listings by it takes one query, and it turns out to describe the map's real composition better than the category field does: a long tail of genuine businesses, plus several hundred thousand vending machines wearing business clothing, plus at least one entire retail chain that was liquidated in 2024 and is still standing on the map.
Query the Google Maps dataset yourself
Every figure here came from live queries against Crawlora's Google Maps business dataset — 132 million listings, filterable by country, state, category, phone, website, rating and review count. 2,000 free credits a month, no card.
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Frequently asked questions
How many Google Maps listings share the same phone number?
Very few, which is what makes it a useful signal. Across 15,865,904 US listings carrying a phone there are roughly 12,423,676 distinct numbers, a mean of 1.277 listings per number. But the tail is extreme: six numbers account for 166,191 listings, 73 numbers cover 365,645, and the 1,000 most-shared numbers cover 546,835 listings, or 2.73% of the entire US map.
Which phone number appears on the most US Google Maps listings?
+1 800-463-3339, on 38,145 listings titled 'FedEx Drop Box'. It decodes to 1-800-GoFedEx, the number FedEx publishes on its own contact page. The next largest are LibertyX Bitcoin ATM on +1 800-511-8940 with 33,974 listings, the United States Postal Service on +1 800-275-8777 with 30,979, and Redbox on +1 866-733-2693 with 26,383.
Are Redbox kiosks still listed on Google Maps?
Yes. 26,383 US listings titled Redbox remain in the data, all sharing one phone number, two years after Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment converted its bankruptcy to a Chapter 7 liquidation in July 2024 and shut roughly 24,000 kiosks. Google itself marks them: loading one of those listings on Google Maps shows 'Permanently closed'. The dataset has no field for closure, so a closed kiosk and an operating business are represented identically.
Does Google Maps data overcount businesses?
Yes, in at least three ways. Unattended machines are listed as places: among the 40 most-shared phone numbers alone there are 79,830 ATMs, 44,614 mailing drop points, 27,232 EV chargers and 26,383 DVD kiosks. Closed businesses persist because no closure field exists in the data. And some listings are created in bulk by online services rather than corresponding to a staffed location. Filtering non-business categories helps but does not catch a closed chain, whose category reads like ordinary retail.
What does an identical review count across thousands of listings indicate?
That the number is a property of how the listings were created rather than of customer behaviour. PhotoAiD, an online passport-photo service, holds 4,644 US listings on a single phone number with 91.2% of them showing exactly 7 reviews. Genuine per-location counts spread out instead: Redbox's listings sit at 62.1% with one review and a decaying tail. Eight of eight sampled PhotoAiD listings no longer resolved on Google.