Notorious fake nominations with existing fake spots

General Discussion
1

This topic’s purpose is not to point finger at anybody. I am not gonna reveal people nor places. I ask for suggestions how to deal with some situations.

So I am not that experienced in reviewing, I barely got 2 upgrades so far. Yet, I read this forum, I try do do my best and to be as fair as I can be.

I have a problem with how to review notorious fake nominations, multiple attempts of inaccurate spots placements and intentional misleading in nominations.

There are some nominations that are pretty easy to spot that a picture used in nomination was taken in a absurdly different place. How? The info sign that was used in the nomination clearly states that the object in the picture was taken 200 km away from the nomination pin. When you see a nomination from Detroit, it is written in the picture, and it is pinned in Alabama it’s super obvious, right?

This is when I report. When a nomination is so fake that even a Niantic employee, who does not have to know, obviously, any languages from continental Europe, can simply use GPT or Gemini to translate what can be seen in the nomination picture. Because a report, this is what I believe, is the way point that something is explicitly wrong.

2 weeks later I get to review another spot. This is exactly the same location. The same place that last nomination got accepted, another ultra fake nomination appears to get reviewed. Again, you can’t see it on satellite pictures, there is no street view, but it’s not something that leaves any space for interpretation. This is so absurd, that exactly near the previous (somehow) accepted spot (one I reported as super fake), literally in the next S2 cell to the last one, another nomination appears with again pictures of a different place, that is located, and everyone who can read, hundreds of km away from where nomination is.

Different place, different strategy. Someone makes nominations of existing places situated near his standalone house, private property, anyone can see that on Google maps satellite, and pins them exactly in his garden. Every single time I try to move the accurate pin location to where it actually is. In the next few weeks I get to review more nominations, of real places and again someone places their pins where he can spin pokestops from his home. Football stadium? Stop’s pin is in his garden. Town hall? Exactly on his property’s fence. Community outdoor fitness station? Just on his driveway. None of them are pinned correctly, nothing I do during the reviewing process matter. Next week I get to review a spot with a mail post situated 300 m from his property, yet it is pinned in the nomination on his property, his land, just calculated to be in a different cell.

And this is what made me write this post. A single house in the middle of nowhere. Forests in every single direction. I get to review a nomination and while looking if there are any duplicates, his driveway to the public road is so full of accepted spots. Some of them are shrines, some are playgrounds, some info signs of hiking routes, some of hidden in the woods monumental sites. I skip that, coz I am not so sure how to verify anything, maybe satellite pictures are too old to see it all, but it’s unbelievable that anything is there. Still, this is just a skip for me. But when I get to review another nomination from this exact spot and pictures are so obviously faked, paint master for sure, now I report it, there is no way that a public swimming pool got constructed in the middle of nowhere just next to a private property, right? 2 weeks later I get another nomination, swimming pool got accepted, now it’s a mural, this is a picture of a mural, perfectly calculated in the next cell, in the middle of a forest.

Again, I do not want to bring harm to anyone. All I ask is how am I supposed to deal with this kind of nomination situations. Am I supposed to just report that again and again and act like nothing happened when I get another fake nomination from the same place, or is it possible to, as I get upgrades to promote my nominations, get a super report and make a upgraded report?

I feel so unmotivated to review anything. So many ask here why their nomination got declined, when it was a genuinely good. Yet I try my best to be fair and it does not matter. Fakes are being accepted and real nominations get bullied all the time.

1 Like
2

Hello and welcome @Sawpel

It is frustrating when you come across situations like this.

The best way to report situations like this is via this form

You can put all the details and the wayfarer team will investigate.

You get an email and ticket number so can follow up.

It can take time for reports to work through

3

Hello and welcome,

Just to add to what @elijustrying noted:

If you feel that a nomination is fake while reviewing, you can report it as such. There is a Report button in the upper right (for edits, it’s next to the Submit button on the bottom center), and you can choose Fake Nomination and provide more details. You can also downvote on Accuracy, choose Abuse>Fake Nomination, as well as provide more info in the text box. When a nomination gets tagged as abuse, staff will review them to see if this is the case.

If you skipped the nomination or are still finding a good deal of them, do use the Reporting Abuse link at the top of the forums.

4

Hello and welcome,

Do use the link which @elijustrying has set in the comment.

I feel with your situation, you try so hard yet nothing seems to work out, seeing your work being for nothing.

Do try to gather as much evidence (like screenshots of the reviews you have gotten, or geotagged photo’s from the location itself if possible) to set in the abuse form where you can freely put coordinates and the submitter of these submissions with a explaination.

I do hope it works, so it is fair place for everybody.

Good luck

5

This is not true.

If people see fake, many people gonna reject it. There are multiple way that fakes got accepted. I wont go into detail but there are time that emily “auto accept” incorrectly accept ineligible nomination. In the other hand, its also possible that review circle is happening in your area. But these fake wayspot are just staying on borrowed time. If you stick around, you will notice people reporting fake portal in forum and it got deleted. Unfortunately with how wayfarer works, fake wayspot usually only got removed if someone report it. Its impossible for staff to check all nomination in the first place

Regarding real nomination, if you are so sure that your nomination is valid candidate, you can ask in forum to improve your submission.

1 Like
6

Just to be clear for the OP, the ability of the machine learning model to accept nominations was turned off when this was brought to light, and we have had no notice that ML accepts have been turned back on:

3 Likes
7

The OP is a good question and I think many of us have seen similar things.

Firstly, absolutely do report these using the abuse link. I’ve reported multiple related fake wayspots on a single report. All these reports get looked at in my experience.

Secondly, it can be useful to post these in the forum if you want people to be aware or simply to discuss it. Staff do monitor the forum and take action.

Thirdly, take notes of the submissions. We’ve been promised a Wayfarer map so you can check back on them later. I used to do this with Lightship or the Ingress Intel map when it synced with Wayfarer. If the fake submissions are being accepted through a voting ring then this can help to uncover it.

Finally, if someone is manipulating submissions in this way then that is cheating. It’s not something being done accidentally, if they get banned then they get banned and will have to live with the consequences.

1 Like
9

I feel you OP, the external report abuse form is my friend now. I don’t get so many brazen fake nominations in my part of the world but I’ve seen plenty of S2 cell manipulators nominating wayspots that are in the area but are in wildly inaccurate locations. I ususally give them the benefit of the doubt but when one area is littered with loads of wrongfully placed wayspots , I become incredibly suspicious.

I hope Niantic realeases the Wayfarer map, because if they did it could make location edits so much easier as you probably won’t have to contend with the 20min time limit during reviews.

I stand with you, my brother/sister, and hope that Niantic can make things easier for us reviewers and for themselves as well.

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I don’t agree with the statement that fakes are being accepted all the time, and nominations that may be eligible are always getting rejected. If a reviewer finds a fake while reviewing, there are ways to report it as such while reviewing. If fakes do get approved, there are ways to report them via the Reporting Abuse link.

I think I’ve only seen about 1-2 fakes accepted and added as Wayspots on the map, and I have made sure to report these as such after finding them while playing. Niantic Scopely takes abuse reports seriously, whether it comes from reviewing or from someone using the report link, and do make sure to do thorough investigations.

It’s actually a great thing that we can report fakes and not just let them linger about. We all want an accurate map, and if we didn’t have ways to keep it up-to-date, that would be a bummer for a lot of us.

1 Like