Fake Articles About Commercial Mortgages and Commercial Loans

by Stephen A. Bush

Summary:

The problems described in this AEX Commercial Loans article are seen throughout the internet for topics such as SBA loans and business cash advances. As suggested in this article, the increasing frequency of fake internet articles about commercial financing should be a serious concern for small business owners.

Fake or fictitious articles about commercial loans and commercial mortgages should be a serious concern for small business owners. There are several unethical and inappropriate uses of internet content in which the website owner does not have permission to use the published information. At a minimum, a fake article about commercial finance topics such as commercial real estate financing and business cash advances is likely to cause unnecessary confusion for commercial borrowers. The biggest risk is that incorrect business financing decisions could be based on inaccurate articles. The underlying problems with fake articles as described here can have a broad impact because the trends described in this article can also be seen throughout the internet for many other subjects such as business opportunity loans and credit card processing.

In the discussion below we will identify the major trouble signs to be alert for and offer two practical strategies to avoid the publishers of fake articles about small business loans. Another AEX Commercial Financing article provides more detail about avoiding fake article sites.

There are several primary players that maliciously use business finance content for which they do not have a copyright or ownership. Many of the sites misappropriating working capital loans articles are seeking additional content so that they will be discovered more often by search engines. In most cases, they expect to gain monetarily by an increased number of visitors which in turn serve as potential clickers of paid advertising links.

These sites often steal their articles by using specialized software which scours the internet for relevant content based on particular keyword phrases such as working capital and commercial mortgage loans. Some of the software randomly combines sentences from multiple sites and produces an article which is usually unintelligible because it has been written by a software robot. This is not likely to bother the owners of sites using the questionable practice since their primary goal is to get visitors to click on links which produce revenues for them. For the discerning reader who realizes these are nonsensical articles, this approach offers a telling clue to use as a basis for avoiding such sites.

Our first recommended strategy for avoiding fake commercial financing article content requires the reader to briefly review the overall content on the website in a concerted effort to see if it makes sense or not.

There are many sites hosted by commercial loan brokers which literally have stolen content and published it as their own. An increasing number of inexperienced commercial mortgage and business cash advance brokers have attempted to make themselves look more experienced than they actually are by using articles written by others. What makes this situation different from the first example is the likelihood that the website will steal entire articles from reputable sources and then delete proper references to the originating author. Since the original article was typically published by a business financing expert, the resulting stolen article will look and feel like a legitimate analysis of complex topics like SBA loans and working capital financing.

In our experience most commercial finance brokers who are guilty of this highly unethical and illegal practice are likely to attempt to stay under the radar by stealing only one or two articles and using them as their own. The absence of multiple articles is a potential telling clue that either that the publisher is simply not very experienced in successfully completing complicated strategies involving small business loans or that the content might have been taken from another author.

Our second strategy for avoiding fake business finance articles requires the reader to perform at least a brief search engine review for related articles by the owner of the website.

There are several approaches about what to do next. Our specific recommendations are described in a separate AEX Working Capital Report which provides three practical strategies for minimizing the growing problem of fake articles throughout the internet community.