Grant Money Scams - A Closer Look at the Affiliate Connection

In the article 'Selling the Grant Scam' I laid out how there is a specific group of affiliate marketers that do not hesitate to promote these 'grant kit', 'grant check' and 'free government money' sites. They do not care if the money they make is by promoting dubious sites that bank on their ability to con people in need.

I also wrote how Google is one of the leading contextual advertising providers that, despite its corporate mantra of making money without doing evil, keeps the Adwords advertising platform open to scam promotion and makes a profit in the process. More than two weeks ago the FTC declared that Google committed to assist in weeding out the misleading ads with the expectation of 'swift results', but Google snoozes while the US consumer loses.

Let's examine how all of this interacts. At the end of this post it will be clear that

• Affiliate marketers play a big role in the perpetuation of this grant scam scheme
• Grant scam sites and affiliate landing pages for these sites still have plenty of opportunity to advertise their crap via the Google Adwords contextual advertising platform
• Things are not always what they seem: depending on which of his sites you look at, an affiliate marketer may 'recommend' one program over the other
• A guy in Greece utilizes an American company (Google) to advertise dubious US Federal Grant scam sites, luring US Citizens to multiple scam front-ends he created, which are hosted by an American hosting provider (Liquidweb) on one of their servers

Remember the premium Google ads when searching for 'grant money' on Google?

Let's take a closer look at the ad in the top position. It probably costs the advertiser anywhere between $2-3 when someone clicks on that ad. They would not be paying that kind of money for advertising if there was no 'healthy' ROI, so apparently people are still signing up for these grant scams. When we click on the ad, we arrive here:


Looks nice, not? Here's how they start:

"Our team has been working for more than 3 years in gathering and reviewing the available Government Grants.We noticed that during the last year, a huge online promotion of many government grant programs has taken place. Unfortunately many of these programs were nothing but a scam! During the last 8 months we focused on reviewing all these sites that claim to help you qualify for the top government grants, in order to protect you from the scam."

Then they go on to promote 3 specific grant programs, each being given a 5 or 4 star rating. Needless to say, the did not really 'review' any site but just picked a couple that have an affiliate payout of $30 per sale or so.

They also suggest the following:

"TIP: We highly recommend that you submit to all 3 programs. A combination of Grant Funding Express, Government Funded Grants and Government Funding Solutions, will assure that you will qualify for the best possible grant option. And they are Free!! "

The three recommended sites are all of the scam type; Cheap shipping but - tucked away in the fine print - sneaky sign-ups to an expensive 'service' and one or several 'bonus programs' with monthly recurring fees that can run close to $100 in total. And if you take their 'recommendation' and sign up for all three ... do the math... The recommendations they make are:

www.grantfundingexpress.com
www.governmentfundedgrants.com
www.governmentfundingsolutions.com

When we look at the Terms and Conditions, this catches our eye:

Terms and Conditions of EarnCashFromGrants.com Thank you for visiting the www.earncashfromgrants.com website ("Website"). The Site is an Internet property of earncashfromgrants.com ("Government Funded Grants," "we" or "us")

Huh what? Earncashfromgrants.com? I thought we were on Grantsreport.net? Well obviously someone has been having some copy-paste fun without even bothering to change the text.

Now when we look at the contact us page, we see this:

Contact Us Email to admin@govgrantsreport.com

Huh what? Govgrantsreport.com? I thought we were on Grantsreport.net?

Let's have a look at that domain, govgrantsreport.com:


Look familiar? This time their recommendations ('after careful review!') are different:

www.grantwritingexpress.com
www.governmentfundedgrants.com
www.economiccrisisgrant.x [? not verifyable, currently redirects to some other I'll make you rich site]

If things smelled a little fishy to begin with, right now it must smell like we're at the fish market in the middle of a hot summer's day.

Let's dig some more.

If you're not familiar what 'WHOIS' tools, they basically allow you to look up information on who registered a domain and where it is hosted. A WHOIS query for domain grantsreport.net does not return anything useful (private registration - meaning the actual registrant's information is hidden), but a WHOIS query of govgrantsreport.com via Domaintools.com returns the following:

Registrant:
pantelis kakaris
D. Vikela 8
Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54638
Greece

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: GOVGRANTSREPORT.COM
Created on: 16-Jan-09
Expires on: 16-Jan-10
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-09

Administrative Contact:
kakaris, pantelis pkakaris@gmail.com
D. Vikela 8
Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54638
Greece
302310206106

Technical Contact:
kakaris, pantelis pkakaris@gmail.com
D. Vikela 8
Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54638
Greece
302310206106

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.PSIFIOHOSTING.COM
NS2.PSIFIOHOSTING.COM

No kidding, someone in Greece runs these sites, 'recommending' US Citizens on how to obtain US Government Grants. He surely must possess the mythological powers of a Greek God to pull that off!

The domaintools.com page also provides us with some other useful information, such as the fact that this person owns a lot of other domains, that the meta tags on his grant site are 'acai', 'superfood', 'weight loss' etc (I guess he runs a bunch of weight loss affiliate programs and forgot to change the meta tags), and my goodness look at the visitor count (via compete.com):

That is close to 30.000 visitors within a period of two months, most of them from the US no doubt. Considering the fact that this is a newly registered domain and that most visitors must have come in via paid links (ads via the Adwords platform for example) it is not unlikely that this guy spent at least $30,000 on advertising. That should tell you something about the return he gets and the amount of people he sends through to scamholes' sites.

No wonder Google snoozes, killing this guy's ad campaigns would cost Google quite dearly (remember, he probably runs at least 75-100 affiliate sites as far as I could see) .

@Google: Tough choice, making money or not doing evil? NOT REALLY. Kill this scam perpetuater's Adwords account, please.

We can also see the hosting server IP, which resolves to a box at Liquidweb in Lansing Michigan:

@Liquidweb: Thanks for supporting the ripping off of your fellow citizens. You're making a valuable contribution to our suffering economy.

Copying some of this info to the scam site blacklist in progress (see tab on top).