Follow-Up: Government Grant Scams Are Still Alive and Well

Back in February, we warned our readers about the “Obama stimulus grant” scam, which was basically a bunch of poorly constructed websites promising people free money that didn’t exist. The money from the last bailout went to companies, not citizens, but these pages claimed that if you applied for certain government grants, you’d be sent your own cut of the cash, and huge ad networks like Google AdSense were carrying these ads despite their obvious fraudulence. The first time I saw one was above my Gmail inbox. While I was researching my article, I even saw these ads next to articles telling people that they were a scam! So I pointed out the obvious flaws in these websites and explained that this was just a new form of an old scam that’s been on the internet for years, offering you a free booklet or CD that would tell you how to receive grants from the government by just filling out a few simple forms. Once they got someone’s credit card number, they’d charge victims way more for the product than promised, never actually send out this supposed grant information, and even charge some people every month thereafter for random amounts of money. Since these ads were popping up under a new name just about everywhere after the bailout, I figured it was worth mentioning.

As it turns out, quite a few people were researching these “stimulus grants” to see if they were legit and stumbled across the article. We were one of the only websites talking about it at the time, so Google was sending us a ton of traffic from the same keywords that the scammers were ranking for. Within days of posting my article, many other (re: much bigger) websites picked up on the story and posted their own debunking stories, so ours was soon forgotten, but I was glad to be one of the first blogs to break the story anyway. I picked on one site in particular, mainly because it was the first one I had seen, but also because it was just so damn shoddy. (You have to read my description for yourself to understand just how shoddy I mean here.) I didn’t understand how anyone could fall for something so obviously fake, but it apparently worked at some point.

After linking to his site and sending him several personal comments, I noticed that his page started to change. Down came all the pictures I had poked fun at and his “true life story” suddenly disappeared. But instead of editing his site behind the scenes, he started making amendments and immediately posting them. His “real name” on the menu suddenly changed and didn’t match the name he was using in his content. Then he posted two different stories about his economic woes, one right after the other; neither of which matched up. A few days later, I went to take a screenshot of the site just for kicks and (Surprise!) it was gone. The entire thing was deleted. I’d like to think that my article and constant harassment had something to do with it, but it was probably due to the fact that the entire internet was now ripping apart these scams and the jig was up at this point (or someone reported his ass and his site was shut down by his host). Despite these much more likely scenarios, fuck ‘em…I’ll take credit anyway.

The “stimulus grant” scam is now pretty much over and done with, but beware – the grant scams still exist in their original form. I won’t link any here because they don’t deserve any more backlinks than they already have, but a quick Google search for “government grants” will take you to many different presentations of this same old scheme. It’s going to take a lot more than some humorous blog posts to take these douchebags down, and since anyone can set up a site offering essentially nothing, more and more can pop up every day. If you stumble across one, get off the page as soon as possible in case the site has malware and report them to their hosts when possible. But most of all, DON’T FUCKING FALL FOR THEM. If anyone offers you easy money, especially on the internet, it’s a scam. Not 50% of the time. Not 98% of the time. It is always a goddamn scam. That much doesn’t require research, people – just the head on your shoulders.