10 years
Here is a related story about the mass-hijacking of Google+ Pages of hotels:
http://searchengineland.com/thousands-of-hotels-listings-were-hijacked-in-google-local-181670
When you claim or create a listing, Google will send a physical letter to your address. But still, these things happen. Creating and claiming a listing in Google Plus is one of the most important things you can do for Local Search Engine Optimization. The other is to include schema.org rich snippets. These are essentially metadata that tells Google more information about your business. For example, you can define that you are a hostel, your address, phone, coordinates, etc.
We integrated this feature into our system. You can see one example here, and also test your own website.
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