“On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog… and the flip side is that I can claim to be a dog (or a Googlebot) whenever I feel like it.”
The user agent string is self-reported text. Anyone can type Googlebot into it. So when your logs show Googlebot flattening your server, the odds are it is a scraper wearing the costume, because real Googlebot is rate-limited and verifiable by reverse DNS. Plenty of admins have blocked actual Google traffic over this. Check the IP before you blame the crawler.