Obama Checks and Government Grants – New Facebook Ad Scam

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Check out these latest Facebook scam ads.  Free Government Grants!  Obama giving away stimulus money!  $12,000!  $13,000!  Even $17,000 to pay off your bills, take a vacation, whatever you want!  Only $1.99 shipping charge to get $15,000 in days!  For only that much, how could you possibly lose…

Looks like there is a new ad scam making the round on Facebook.  It still astounds me that they allow this junk into their advertising.  Even Google, with their tens of millions of daily ads manages to weed out most of the scams and cheats.  Facebook apparently has no such policy in place, as they keep showing me ads like these over and over again.

Looks great huh!  Free money from Obama’s US Government Grants!  Except there is no such thing.  This is the same tired old Grant scam that’s been going around for years now.

Here is how it works:

1. Tempt you with an offer that sounds both attractive and plausible at the same time.  Note that these aren’t grants for $500 (who cares) or for $1,000,000 (totally unlikely).  They’re for an amount that seems possible, yet still enough to pique your interest.
2. When you click through, you’re greeted by a single squeeze page site with a testimonial by Daniel Hynes or Jeff Donahue or Jake Cutler, now today it’s Cory Mathews.  They all look virtually identical on sites like jeffgetsgrants.com or jakecutler.com or kevingotgreen.com, and now just today coreyhasmoney.com.  As if these people went and setup single page sites just so that you, (the poor mark), might get a nice fat check from the government for doing nothing, just like the say they did!
3. There are lots of comments on the page, making it look like a normal blog page.  However, if you look closer, you’ll notice that there isn’t actually any place on the page to enter a comment!
4. Even better, just recently they’ve added fake ads on the page that look like Google Adwords ads.  Click on any of them and you get sent directly to the scam page.  There are only two ways off the coreyhasmoney.com site, either hit your back button, or click on any of the different looking links to go directly to the scam.
5. They’re also getting lazy.  On the Cory Mathews site, the picute of the grant check has the name Jeffrey Donahue photoshopped onto it!
6. Note that the grant kit only costs $1.99 and the testimonial really pushes that fact.  What’s $1.99 when you’ll be getting $15,000 or $45,000!  You’d be an idiot to worry about such a small sum in order to gain such riches!
7. There are no other links on the page other than the ones to the “great” offer, one of the origins of the term “squeeze page” that you have no other way off the page and are squeezed down to the offer.

So you click through and you’re brought to earncashfromgrants.com or grant-access-club.com, now today it’s www.federalgovernmentgrantsolutions.com.  The sites change every couple of days to avoid the people who have caught on to the scam.  Now the alarm bells should REALLY start going off, but somehow don’t for most people.  I’ll apologize if you’re one of the poor folks that fell for this and are now looking to get out of it.  Want to know some FOOLPROOF methods to tell if any random Internet offer is a scam or not?

1. If there is a little talking torso in the corner of your browser that doesn’t go away when you scroll RUN FOR THE HILLS!   You’re about to be scammed.
2. If it is a Timed Offer and you only have 9 minutes or 3 minutes 15 seconds to complete the offer.  Hurry!  You’re about to be scammed.

So you scroll through all the glowing testimonial bullcrap and get to the bottom where your asked a bunch of questions like marital status, current income level, employment status, etc.  All this is intended to get you to believe that you’re getting some special treatment, that you *qualify* for this great offer!  Note, it doesn’t matter what you enter in for this part, everyone gets to feel all special.

Then the kicker comes.  For only $1.99 or $1.95 you get the free kit!  Most people don’t scroll down far enough to see the fine print at the bottom of the page.  If they did they would see this:

Or this:

What is *REALLY* amazing is how many people must be falling for this.  The earncashfromgrants.com site has an Alexa rank of 35,000 and has only been around since November of 2008 according to Alexa.  It’s one week rank is around 6,500, which means they are getting thousands of hits daily if not tens of thousands, likely converting hundreds of those hits into poor folks (hopefully not you, if so, I’m sorry) inadvertently coughing $40-60 for this junk, many of whom probably don’t even cancel the first month and might get taken for $100 or more.  That’s likely $5000-$10,000 A DAY they’re scamming hard working people out of, and all they need a website and a live operator over in India to get yelled at by people trying in vain to get a refund or cancel their “subscription”

It’s no wonder why these ads are everywhere.

What do you get for the $1.99 plus the hidden $58.61 charge?  A tired old report on government grants, or nothing as some people have reported not being able to even log into the site they give after they have paid.

It’s going to take the Feds months or years to track down and stop these people, and even if they do, once they take it, you’ll never see the money they took from you again.  The only thing to do is warn everyone you can not to fall for it.

Here is what you can do to help:

1. Click Here to Share this on Facebook! Hit “Post to Profile” to warn you friends and loved ones.
2. Use the “Share This” link below to Digg or Twitter or Stumble or Reddit or whatever service you use to share this so that other people might see it before they get scammed too!
3. File a Complaint to the ICCC (Internet Crime Complaint Center) at ic3.gov.