Visiting Indianapolis for the Dummy Traveler

Indianapolis Children's Museum

It's time to take another look at fake travel reviews again, and with the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500 (the iconic auto racing event, no matter what NASCAR fans say), we thought we'd take another look at the Crossroads of America. We've already caught serial armchair traveler Isabelle Esteves pretending to have visited Indy, so we thought we'd see who else out there likes to write fake travel reviews. It took just one google search – indianapolis site:hubpages.com – to turn up a bit of badly-spun content some lazy, self-appointed "freelance writer" had apparently lifted from the city's tourism bureau. The culprit this time? HubPages.com's Arthurart, who performed a not particularly scintillating bit of copy-mangling in a post he called "What to See in Indianapolis."¹

Indianapolis for Dummy Visitors

Children's Museum of Indianapolis

We have a staffer or two here at the Antisocial Network who've done some traveling over their real-life careers (one's been on six continents...) so we find it so-called "travel" reviews simply harvested from chamber of commerce PR releases rather irritating; especially those written by people who it's pretty obvious have never actually visited the featured destination. We also have a staffer who's lived in Indianapolis... twice. So he was somewhat taken aback to find repeat offender Isabelle Esteves holding forth on "Three good reasons to visit Indianapolis, Ind." for the fake (and now defunct)¹ news site Examiner.com (which, we suspect, she repurposed from her account at another dead website, Helium.com). We did wonder what other Indianapolis Izzy might have been thinking about, since (as far as we know) there's only one.²