I’ve never seen a claim quite like this before and was immediately suspicious. The location pin makes no sense, being in the back of what appear to be residential buildings with no rear parking and with the supporting photo showing what appears to be a car to the left of the mural.
I tried a reverse image search and came up with a lot of hits, but none that actually listed the location.
The first one i honed in on showed a small bit of a business to the right but searching various “BB” business names got me nowhere
After clicking through a half dozen of those hits, I found a page with this:
So I searched for locations of “oddfellows icecream” and checked each one but still came up empty. Then i looked up “houston st” in new york and followed the streetview car all along it but still couldn’t find it.
Finally i did a google search for “oddfellows ice cream houston st new york” and found a “permanently closed” listing with an address.
The nominator went to significant lengths to try and sell their nomination which normally would be enough to pass without much of a look but i’m glad i took the time on this one.
It is a weird amount of work to go through on the part of the nominator… Couldn’t they have just submitted the hearts mural that you ended up discovering? Seems like that wouldn’t be any harder, unless, of course, they’re nowhere near that location!
The location shown in the review is quite different from the location of either mural, so yeah, they’re submitting nowhere near the location of either mural.
Thank you for sharing this. Sometimes people get upset over having to prove their nominations, but this example of the lengths people will go to for a fake Wayspot shows exactly why proof is necessary. And why the team has to be hesitant to just accept our word for anything.
So I just took a look, it’s been approved and retired twice at the location it was nominated this time. So even their claim of “falsely removed” is a lie. @NianticAaron can you ask the team to take a look at this nominator please?
