Possibly fake Kiva loans | Hacker News Reader

Possibly fake Kiva loans

16 pointsfisadev16 comments

These two profiles are too similar to be just a coincidence, the text appears to be auto-generated just replacing the numbers, names and specific bits.

Maybe somebody is gaming/abusing Kiva? Or is Kiva itself creating fake profiles? I'll contact them and post any updates.

Profile 1: http://goo.gl/cBytRa Profile 2: http://goo.gl/79re14 Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/0NUaI

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Looks to me like there are just two women with children in Sierra Leone that run little shops that sell similar items.

I'm sure Kiva has several templates that they use to post loans - you don't think they write each one by hand, do you?

Actually, the Kiva field partners do write the profiles, and a team of 300+ volunteers translate them & edit for typos:

http://www.kiva.org/about/editingprogram

There's a story of one of the Kiva Coordinators who photographs the borrowers and writes their loan descriptions here:

http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/fellowsblog/2013/05/25/connectin...

Of course, when there's lots of loans to process, some of the field partners do have a tendency to just fill-in-the-blank-template.

Search Query "loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks, and soap to expand her business"

1. Helping Through Kiva - Surigao Internet Marketing www.surigaointernetmarketing.com/.../helping-through-kiva?view...id...‎ Posseh requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks, and soap to expand her business. She hopes that the extra income from this loan will allow her to ...

2. Helping Through Kiva - Surigao Internet Marketing www.surigaointernetmarketing.com/.../helping-through-kiva?view...id...‎ Kadie requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks, and soap to expand her business for resale. She hopes that the extra income from this loan will ...

3. Adama - EmmausChurches.org www.emmauschurches.org/index.php?option=com_jfmicro...‎ Adama requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks and soap to expand her business. She hopes that the extra income from this loan will allow her to ...

4. Wakibi - Microkrediet aan Mbalu, Sierra Leone www.wakibi.nl/2-657214/‎ Translate this page Jan 14, 2014 - Mbalu requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks and soap to expand her business. She hopes that the extra income from this loan ...

5. <社会貢献> シエラレオネ共和国で一般商店をしている起業家 Hawaさん kivajapan.org/entrepreneurs/?k_guid=654331‎ Translate this page Hawa requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks and soap to expand her business. She hopes that the extra income from this loan will allow her to ...

looks like a template

Maybe cigarettes, drinks and soap have the highest margins...

Yes, cigarettes are often sold as singles in areas around the world where tobacco sales aren't heavily regulated. So a pack of 20 cigarettes that costs $5 can be sold for .30c each one, giving a higher profit. This practice disappeared in the early 90s where I am from but I come across it all the time in developing countries.

An update from Kiva: their field partners, who may not have english as a first language, use templates and fill in the blanks. So nothing to be alarmed from.

The full response:

"Hi Juan,

Thanks so much for your email and writing in about these two loan profiles.

I took a look, and while the stores do look similar, and the language is also similar, these are two distinct borrowers.

As you may know, the loan descriptions you see on Kiva's website are written by our Field Partners. To help the staff at our partners, who may not have English as a first language, our team will sometimes provide loan description templates. These templates help make it easier for our Field Partners to draft loan descriptions by allowing them to fill in different facts about the borrower, such as number of children, marital status, etc. Because some of our partners have these templates, you may see similarities in the style of different loan descriptions from the same Field Partner. This may be why you see loans with similar verbiage when browsing the Lend page of our website.

While these similarities shouldn't be a cause of alarm, you may be interested to know that Kiva does use a process called borrower verification to to verify the accuracy of the information included in the borrower profiles posted on the Kiva website.

Hope this provides some helpful context, and if you have any other questions, let me know!"

Lets not forget that Kiva profiles are there purely as a way to entice the individual to lend. The money just goes in aggregate to the local lending org. The profile you see is mostly a gimmick.

Many (most?) loans are now predispersed, and your Kiva loan backfills it... but they are still individual loans. The repayments come back to you according to that borrower's repayments, and sometimes the borrowers do fall behind or default on the loan, in which case you'll get a short explanation of what happened in their particular circumstance and why they defaulted.

So there is a direct connection between you & the borrower, and even more so on Kiva Zip where you can contact the borrower.

I don't see anything bad about that The text looks the same but those seem to be very different people and shops. The Kiva personnel look for certain types of people to lend money to in order to do economic development and sometimes copy and pasting a bit of text best explains to us from afar what they're going to do with the money.

You'd be surprised how many people need to specifically purchase "cigarettes, drinks, and soap" to expand their business.

Could it not just be that there are a lot of people in similar situations getting loans through Kiva and to save time a template is used for the loan description?

Maybe, but they have too much similarities (they want to buy the exact same things, work the exact same time, started their business in the same year, etc). Or maybe it's just statistically not that improbable.

Anyway, I have already asked them, waiting for a response.

Have you also tried posting on the Kiva Friends forum? In particular, you might be interested in the Double Loan Listings thread:

http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,506.0.html

On page 52 of the thread there's an example of different women being photographed at the same store. So it definitely does happen sometimes.

Who writes the profiles? Is it possible that a field partner of Kiva writes the profiles? That might explain the similarity. They might well i) use a template to create the text, and ii) seek out loan candidates who match a very specific set of criteria. That might explain the similarities.

According to those pages, they want more than an average year of income for a person in that area, to buy inventory. Isn't that too much inventory to buy all at once?

And yeah it looks like there was a shared template for both of these.

Assume:

- She has a bare minimum of inventory now, as she doesn't have capital to invest

- Inventory turns are 13 (the 'average' item is on the shelf for 4 weeks)

That would mean she plans her cost of sales to be 13x the average per capita income in that area. That doesn't seem unreasonable if she can get 200 customers to spend 10% of their income in her shop (assuming 50% markup).

Well, depends on your store, product, and supply chain. Wouldn't surprise me if you had to carry lots of inventory in Sierra Leone since your suppliers aren't exactly up to JIT.

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