Possibly fake Kiva loans

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. 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

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.

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

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!"