At AEX Commercial Financing Group, over the years we have repeatedly witnessed how stealing articles from others can have a negative and long-lasting outcome for many parties. But the already-serious problems described here have become much worse in recent months. The underlying problems with fake articles can have a surprisingly far-reaching impact because the trends noted in this cautionary report can also be seen throughout the internet for many other subjects such as credit card processing, real estate investments and SBA loans.

We will identify the major trouble signs to be alert for and offer two practical strategies for avoiding the publishers of fake articles about small business loans and commercial mortgages. AEX has also published another article which goes into 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. These perpetrators are typically seeking financial gains to which they are not entitled on either legal or ethical grounds.

Many of the sites misappropriating commercial finance articles are seeking additional content so that they will be listed more often by search engines. In most cases, they probably hope to gain monetarily by an increased number of visitors which might choose to click 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 commercial loans and working capital loans. Some of the software then randomly combines sentences from multiple sites and produces an article which is frequently unintelligible because it has been written by an internet 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. 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.

There are also 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 working capital funding brokers are attempting to make themselves look more experienced than they actually are by using articles written by others, typically without permission.

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. Given that the original article was typically published by a commercial loans expert, the resulting stolen article will look and feel like a legitimate analysis of complex topics like commercial real estate financing and small business loans.

In our experience most business loan 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 clue that either (1) the publisher is not very experienced in successfully completing complicated commercial loan strategies or (2) the content might have been inappropriately taken from another author.

There are several approaches about what to do next, and as noted above we have discussed several of these recommendations in another commercial loans report.