Big pile of AI-generated fake nominations in Villasmundo, Sicily

Review Support
1

Hello,

over the past two weeks, I have noticed a large number of suspicious Wayspot nominations that appear to be AI-generated or otherwise fake. Many of them show clear signs of abuse: incorrect perspective, nonexistent locations, and in some cases photos that appear to have been taken from a computer monitor in an attempt to disguise artificial generation.
In a few cases, the images even still had the Google Gemini watermark visible in the bottom-right corner. What concerns me most is that I encountered some of these nominations during review, flagged them as fake, and submitted reports. However, several of them now appear to have been approved in the official Wayfarer map (and many other are still in review process).
These nominations seem to be concentrated in a specific area of Villasmundo, Sicily, Italy, which makes me suspect they may be coming from the same source.
Could this pattern be investigated more closely?

Here’s some details:

Documento
Documento1589Ă—1005 220 KB

The Wayspots inside the blue squares are all fake; the ones in the orange square are doubtful, but I’m pretty convinced they are fake too.

Here are the names, images, and GPS location coordinates:

Regarding the two from the orange square: these don’t look AI-generated, but the image quality and suspicious location suggest they are fake (I kindly ask you to take a closer look into them):

That wraps up the ones already live on the map. There are still multiple ones under review; I saved a bunch from my local review history:

I remember there were others, but I lost track of them.
Please take a look into it.

Thank you.

2

There is a link at the top of this page to Report Abuse. You may need to be on a desktop to see it. I would use that link to report all of these. You can choose to copy all the info again and attach photos or you could explain the situation and link to this post. I agree that most of these are clearly AI generated.

3

Yeah I already used the Report Abuse link while I was voting, however some of them still went live.

Now I’m also sending reports from the map too, but I hope they still read this post because these seem clearly connected with each others.

4

Nope, the link at the top is a different way to report abuse.

5

The top of the forum looks like this for me

image
image1899Ă—220 35.6 KB

And those words “Reporting Abuse” link to here:

I find this form easy to use. I used it often before we had map reporting, and still like to write up big reports this way.

6

as cyndiepooh said, I also see the top of the forum in that way. I have reported the wayspots from the map though. What link are you referring to?

7

That link Cyndie gave you is different than if you just mark something as Abuse while reviewing. That link allows you to write it all out as a single story (as you have done here) and include evidence. The advantage is that instead of seeing single reports, a larger picture of abuse becomes obvious to those who review such things.

8

Gotcha, I’ll write there too and link to this post.

I wrote here since I’ve seen multiple similar posts on here about the same topic.
I hope someone from the staff will answer too.

9

Would strongly recommend using the form as suggested - this is the best and fastest way to contact staff that takes care of abuse. Since you already have all of the information as you posted above, it should be easy to fill it.

10

Sure, I’ve done that too.

Hoping for some kind of response :crossed_fingers:

11

Something happened in the last 24 hours:
8 out of 9 reported Wayspots from the map (the ones in the blue squares) were accepted as fake and have been removed.
The only one they didn’t remove is the “Murales Falcone e Borsellino” :person_facepalming:
This one is so obviously fake it even has the Gemini logo on it, and most importantly the image contains the SynthID watermark that proves it was generated by AI (besides the clear AI-look on their faces). I guess they didn’t bother to check it properly.

2026-06-0311-53-01
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telegram-cloud-photo-size-4-5836804149918502721-m
telegram-cloud-photo-size-4-5836804149918502721-m260Ă—275 13.6 KB

Additionally, over the past few days I have encountered more fake Wayspots in review from the exact same area and one of them has already been accepted and is now live:
• Edicola Votiva Madonna Immacolata - (37.250383, 15.087442)

immagine
immagine512Ă—375 106 KB

However, I still haven’t received any answers regarding the abuse report I submitted through the form, nor any feedback here on the forum.
Beyond the fake Wayspots themselves, I want to point out that the bigger problem is the behavior of the person or people who created and submitted them. I really hope some kind of sanction is applied for this abuse.

12

Hi! You’re probably not the only one to report them, especially now that you have shared here, so it could very well be that it’s some other reports getting acted on at this time. Abuse reports that involve more than one wayspot take some time, but you always get a reply. Since it’s only been 3 days I would just be patient. I personally have some older than that that do not have a follow-up yet, and that’s okay :slight_smile:

You are also likely not to get any details on what exact actions are taken on any accounts outside of a high level sentence. This is due to privacy laws.

In short, you are doing everything correctly, just be patient.

13

Sure thing! I don’t want to rush things, I was just giving all the updates so whoever from the team checks this post has all the information in one place.

Regarding the privacy part: definitely, I don’t expect to be told exactly what actions they’ll take or against whom. I just hope they’ll do something about the abuser, like I’ve seen in similar posts.