{"id":635,"date":"2008-05-06T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2008-05-06T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=635"},"modified":"2008-05-05T13:52:56","modified_gmt":"2008-05-05T17:52:56","slug":"google-maps-user-edit-abuses-happening-to-payday-loan-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/06\/google-maps-user-edit-abuses-happening-to-payday-loan-company\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Maps &#8211; User edit abuses happening to Payday loan company?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/payday1.jpg\" alt=\"payday1.jpg\" align=\"right\" \/>I have little sympathy for even the best companies in the payday loan business. Many of them charge as <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB120277630957260703.html?mod=hpp_us_pageone\">much as 400% interest<\/a> (as reported in the WSJ) and manage to illegally get their hands on limited Social Security payments (again according to the WSJ), a practice the government is <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB120882649240433351.html?mod=googlenews_wsj\">attempting to limit.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Google seems to offer some implicit support for these less than savory tactics of this industry by not having removed their mapspam that I reported at <a href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/11\/more-mapspam\/\">here<\/a> and at <a href=\"http:\/\/searchengineland.com\/071211-081848.php\">SearchnEngineland<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It appears that in an industry that is used to preying on people is now preying on itself. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.advanceamerica.net\/aboutadvanceamerica.php\">Advance America<\/a> is a legitimate (I say that advisedly as there are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.yelp.com\/biz\/advance-america-seattle\">reports of them charging close to 400% interest<\/a>) payday loan company that is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&amp;client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=AEA&amp;btnG=Search\">listed<\/a> on the NY Stock Exchange and has 2800 bricks and mortar locations. Their local Map&#8217;s listings, which they have never claimed, are apparently being hijacked in an effort to claim an affiliate fee.<\/p>\n<p>The search in Google Maps for <a href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps?hl=en&amp;client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=payday%20site%3Aadvanceamerica.net&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wl\">payday site:advanceamerica.net <\/a> returns  1941 listings for Advance America, a reasonable approximation of their listings in Google Maps. A little digging into the &#8220;View History&#8221; of the edited records details a veritable tug of war in a number of the records with a company that varies its domain based on the location but appears to have no role in the process other than an affiliate referral role.<\/p>\n<p>I find it ironic that the sharks of the loan industry seem to be eating each other&#8217;s lunch and appear engaged in abuse of the <a href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/18\/google-maps-add-new-place-to-map-update\/\">Google End User edit facilities<\/a> in Maps that was introduced in mid March.<\/p>\n<p>If Google is relying on community policing to keep these kind of practices under control, the system will self destruct. The folks using these services\u00c2\u00a0 don&#8217;t much care and it appears that the aggrieved party doesn&#8217;t have a very sophisticated practice in regards to local. These types of edits should automatically trigger some sort of Google review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have little sympathy for even the best companies in the payday loan business. Many of them charge as much as 400% interest (as reported in the WSJ) and manage to illegally get their hands on limited Social Security payments (again according to the WSJ), a practice the government is attempting to limit. Google seems &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-maps-google-local"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}