Avoiding Fake Commercial Loan and Business Cash Advance Articles

by Stephen A. Bush

In a separate commercial loan report published by AEX Commercial Financing Group, I described the increasing use of fake articles about commercial mortgage loans and business cash advances on a variety of internet sites and provided two practical strategies to avoid the publishers of fictitious information concerning commercial mortgages and other business financing.

Please contact us directly regarding recommendations which were previously discussed. In the report shown here, we will provide more detailed suggestions for avoiding this growing problem.

A PERSONAL NOTE FROM STEPHEN BUSH —

We will certainly take it as a compliment if another business loan provider uses one of our comments on their website and includes credit that reflects that it was originally published by AEX. What we are discussing in the summary below is the illegal and/or unethical use of someone else's published work and intentionally making it appear that it was written by someone who actually did nothing more than "copy and paste" the stolen report. As a direct example of what this problem looks like in real life, a company — calling themselves US Commercial Financial Group, USFG, US Financial Group and US Commercial Financing Group (supposedly located at 244 Fifth Avenue East, New York City) and whose chief executive is identified as Thomas Tsilionis or Tom Tsilionis — published a press release May 18, 2009 which was directly based on an AEX press release published earlier in the year and then merely substituted new contact information for the original AEX information. This company did not even take the time to revise the press release section which referred to the business being "based in Ohio" (AEX Commercial Financing Group obviously is headquartered in Ohio, but please keep in mind that this company is reporting in their press release contact data that they are located in New York City). Because they "copied and pasted" an AEX press release, their now-fraudulent press release contains one misleading statement after another such as "publishes a comprehensive free resource, The Working Capital Journal" — this has been published by AEX Commercial Financing Group since 2008. By the way, The Working Capital Journal can be easily found on prominent search engines like Google by looking for "working capital journal".

Our main objective in featuring this particular problem is to alert small business owners about a situation which could adversely impact their commercial finance process. Obtaining short-term commercial loans and long-term business financing in the current commercial lending environment is hard enough for borrowers without also having to deal with a business loan advisor whose credentials are "copied and pasted" from a reputable company.

The use of reputable publication sites is an effective and important way to avoid fake articles about business cash advances and commercial mortgage loans.

Such sites will employ their best efforts to eliminate articles for which the author does not have ownership rights. Two prominent examples are EzineArticles and Buzzle. These responsible and high-quality sites will require review of articles by a human editor prior to publication. Most of these websites will provide detailed contact information for the author, and some will even require that authors submit sample articles to demonstrate their professional capabilities before publication.

For articles not published on a site well-known for quality content, a little detective work might be necessary.

The absence of detailed phone and email contact information will suggest that the site is possibly focused on having visitors click on advertising links rather than actually talk or write to someone associated with the website. The worst offenders will typically steal content published originally on a high-quality site (such as those described above) and remove the resource box which provides contact information for the author.

Often on these ethically-challenged sites, the best indicator of their questionable value is prominence of articles which do not always make sense if you read them closely. This occurs because many such sites use software to scour the internet and to publish an article based on some random combination from a variety of sources. The resulting content is not designed to make sense but rather to provide certain keywords which will bring search engine traffic.

The bulk of these low-value sites probably prefer that the content itself will be virtually unintelligible to an actual reader because their game plan depends on visitors clicking on paid advertising links. In their minds, the less sense that the actual content makes, the more likely a visitor is to click on a paid link that appears to make sense.

There are also a growing number of commercial loan sites which provide only their contact information along with an article originally published elsewhere by an expert for small business loans. These sites will represent the article(s) as their own and also remove the legitimate resource box for the actual article. There are several strategies which can help with this situation.

First — a detailed conversation with the indicated author will be helpful.

Ask them where other articles they have published about commercial loans can be found on the internet. We have always emphasized the critical importance of such interactive discussions between commercial borrowers and business financing advisors. After all, business owners will eventually need very personalized help with their working capital cash management, and this provides an excellent opportunity to assess the likelihood of getting such individualized attention from this particular source.

Second — use a prominent search engine to perform your own review of other commercial financing articles published by the author.

If articles can only be found on the one website, at a minimum this suggests that the author is certainly not a commercial mortgage loans expert. This is in itself an important finding, because commercial mortgages and business cash advances are more complex than they might appear, and most business owners simply cannot afford to work with inexperienced commercial funding advisors.

Third — we previously described the value of using established article websites. Many of these are now providing an author widget which is very helpful in providing a practical overview of work published by a specific author.

Those sites without such a widget should nevertheless provide a summary index of articles by each author. The widgets or other summaries will help provide an accurate assessment of how many articles a particular author has written as well as the subject matter.

An author well-versed in commercial loans is likely to have published many articles about diverse relevant topics such as business opportunity financing, SBA loans and credit card processing. Regardless of how many articles an author has published or how many subjects they have covered, commercial borrowers should read some of the most relevant articles in their entirety to obtain an initial comfort level as the basis for determining whether to contact the business loan advisor for individualized discussions.