Hello, whilst reviewing I seem to have discovered a town COVERED in fake POIs. I’ve reported the ones I’ve personally reviewed, but is there a way of reporting the area in general so a Niantic employee can comb through the many many fake items?
Thanks
Welcome to the forums 
One route is the help page at Niantic Wayfarer. If you click on the chat icon at the lower right, you can navigate to Report Wayfarer Abuse → Fake Nominations or Criteria Issues. However, this may not be the best place as this might be the chat that you cannot get back to if you close the page.
It is definitely worth aggregating all of the wayspots you have noticed into a single report as this makes it easier for Niantic to see the abuse.
Maybe try:
This article details how you can report Wayspots, nominations, edits that you believe are inappropriate or show signs of abuse.
Please do use the form
If you have already reported and have a ticket number you can cross reference by mentioning that too.
Thanks both.
I’m not the greatest at navigating the reports system but believe I’ve already done both types of report, the reporting of the individual and specific submission whilst reviewing AND using the form linked to above. I’m still coming across more of these fishy submissions, so perhaps I messed the reports up. Or perhaps Niantic don’t agree with my suspicions.
It can take time for a review to be done, especially when it is an area with mass abuse. Definitely keep reporting the fishy submissions.
They do take reports seriously and if you have an email trail they will respond.
Am I in jeopardy doing that though?
Let’s say I’m wrong and these are totally legitimate, won’t I get in trouble for report abuse?
This whole situation makes me very nervous hence the questions but I believe there’s like 30+ of these suspicious items and more are coming through review, I admittedly was skipping them for a while due to this fear of being wrong.
If you are wrong then your report gets rejected, nothing else
Thanks, this is reassuring to be told.
Cheers everyone, I’ll keep reporting them.
Yes, I also reported this. Using public records I was able to show this location is single family private residential property.
We can’t easily confirm the nominations being fake or misplaced, but we can show they are placed in an ineligible location.
If you want to explain the reason why you think they are fake we can discuss.
Understand if you don’t want to show the exact waypoint as this is a Public Forum.
Just stating to staff “This 1 just doesn’t look right” or “not sure about this one” is unlikely to get you anywhere.
“This is on SFPRP as shown on Street View”.
“Street View over many years proves that this does not exist”.
“This is a mis-placed copy of another wayspot located at xx”
are more likely to get these removed as well as “if you are in the area” sending photos showing that the POI does not exist etc.
Good Luck.
Yeah I’m going to be vague here.
It’s more a case of
“these seem to be fake due to how they look, how temporary they seem, and how they have been placed in said area”
It’s not an area local to me so I can’t provide that kind of evidence, however, I really do believe people looking at these with a critical eye would see how… manufactured they appear.
This is one of the reasons I like to review with the cell map on. It’s a lot easier to notice when an area looks fishy. Like everything just so happens to be in its own cell when the activity area is pretty small. You can even start to see ingress misplacments where everything is about 20m apart so that it would show up.
Yep. They’re very strategically placed shall we say…
Update: I received email from Wayfarer that my location report has been accepted.
POIs have been re-appearing at this location. At least two have already been deleted a second time for being on SFPRP. I reported this one (see screenshot) this morning, just approved yesterday. This should also be removed. Is there a way to prevent further approvals at this location?
How is any human reviewer looking at this location and not marking it SFPRP? Has the ML model been set to accept again?
There was another post recently saying that once abuse has been detected in an area, it should be marked internally by the team. This is another example of where it should not be possible for anything else to go live here.
