Often this is part of the scam. Once the scammers have you convinced that they’re official, they tell you to say it’s for holidays or a birthday or something like that so you don’t get stopped when buying gift cards.

Of course, this makes it really annoying to actually try to buy gift cards for gifts, because now when you defend yourself it sounds like you’re getting scammed…

Oops. Good to know… I guess the main thing was simply that there was a BK in the right place relative to the 9792 km arc then.

This might be a stretch but McD can be franchised. If one franchisee pays top dollar for ad placement and other nearby franchises don’t, it would be profitable for them to send you to that franchisee even if it’s further.

…that being said I’m probably reading too much into it. Probably just your usual Google jank.

I’m not the person who found it originally, but I understand how they did it. We have three useful data points: you are 2.6 km from Burger King in Italy, that BK is on a street called "Via " and you are 9792 km from Burger King in Malaysia.

1. The upper BK in Malaysia is not censored, so we have its exact location.
2. Find a place in Italy that is 9792 km away using the Measure Distance tool on something like Google Maps.
3. Even though there are potentially multiple valid locations in Italy, we know you’re within 2.6 km of another BK. Florence is sensible because there are BKs near the 9792 km mark.
4. Once we do that, we can find a spot that is both 9792 km from Malaysia BK and 2.6 km from a nearby BK on a street called “Via”, effectively finding where the image was taken.

It’s not perfect but it works well! This is the principle of how your GPS works. It’s called triangulation. We only had distance to two points and one of them doesn’t tell us the sub-kilometer distance. If we had distance to three points, we could find your EXACT location, within some error depending on how detailed the distance information was.

The FBI put out a PSA late last year that recommends using an ad-blocker for security purposes. It’s the third bullet-point under “Tips to Protect Yourself”: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221

They must have updated. I went there just now and it looks at least a little bit better.