Commercial Loans and Fake Articles

The growing presence of fake articles about commercial loans and working capital financing should be a serious concern for commercial borrowers. We are referring to several inappropriate and unethical uses of internet content in which the website owner does not have permission to use the published information. At a minimum, a fictitious article about finance topics such as commercial mortgages and business cash advances is likely to result in confusion. In more extreme examples, incorrect business financing decisions might be based on inaccurate articles.

Unfortunately the trends described in this article can also be seen throughout the internet community for a wide variety of subjects such as credit card processing, real estate investments and business opportunity financing. Our focus will be on commercial financing because we have seen firsthand for many years how the growing practice of stealing articles from others can have a negative impact.

We will identify the major trouble signs to be alert for and then suggest two practical strategies about how to avoid the publishers of fake articles about small business loans and commercial mortgage loans. We will also publish a future article which will go into more depth about suggestions for avoiding fake article sites. There are several primary perpetrators that maliciously use business finance content for which they do not have ownership or copyright. As you might suspect, all of them are seeking financial gains to which they are not legally or ethically entitled.

Quite a few of the sites which have misappropriated the commercial loans articles are seeking more content so that they will be found more often by search engines. They ultimately hope to gain additional revenues primarily by an increased number of visitors which in turn serve as potential clickers of paid advertising links.

These sites frequently use specialized software which scours the internet for relevant content based on particular keyword phrases such as small business commercial loans and working capital business cash advances. Some of the software then randomly combines sentences from multiple sites and produces an article which frequently seems like gibberish (unintelligible language).

This presumably does not bother the owners of sites which use the questionable practice since their primary goal is to get visitors to click on links which produce revenues for them. However, for the discerning reader who notices the 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 loan article content requires the reader to at least briefly review the overall content on the website. As noted above, we will provide a more detailed discussion of this and other appropriate strategies in a future business financing report.

There are also many sites hosted by commercial loan brokers which literally have stolen content and published it as their own. As we have discussed in previous articles, business financing is extremely complex. An increasing number of inexperienced commercial mortgage and business cash advance brokers have chosen to make themselves look more experienced than they actually are by using (typically without permission) articles written by others.

What makes this example different from the one described above is the likelihood that the suspect website will steal entire articles from reputable sources and then delete proper references to the originating author. Given that the original article was typically published by a commercial loans expert, the resulting stolen article will look and feel like a legitimate depiction about topics like commercial real estate financing and working capital loans.

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

Our second strategy to avoid fake business loan article content will require the reader to perform a brief search engine review for related articles by the owner of the website. In this case, there are several suggested approaches about what to do next and we will discuss these and other recommendations in a future commercial loan report.