Is it even possible to ... ?!

So I was busy adding another couple of sites to the blacklist. I was going by Google Adwords ads advertising grant scam affiliate sites, appearing next to the Google search results when searching for grant-related information.

Next in my list was a site advertising near the top spot of the column, the-grant-review.com. Before even looking at the site I knew this was going to be another affiliate site claiming to have reviewed dozens of grant programs, picking the best ones for you:

Oh the creativity just oozes off the page, not?

When I was looking at the pages, I noticed some text that seemed familiar. In the 'about' page they state:

Created in 2008, The Grant Review is considered by some to be one of the best sources for grant related information. The Grant Review continues to grow and expand its range of useful and insightful content to help its readers understand more about applying and receiving government grants.

Looking at the site and knowing what the site stands for, the ridiculousness of that highlighted statement is hard to describe. Anyway, I knew I had seen that line before, but was not sure where. So I did a simple Google search ["is considered by some to be one of the best sources for grant related information"]:

So there appear to be four sites that use the exact same wording in their 'about us' page. Interesting. Well two out of the four were no longer active as grant scam sites, but a site called government-grants-review.net is:

Looking at this site, I had another scamja vu. This line looked like I had seen it before, more than once, but guess had never paid attention to:

[...] Is it Even Possible to get Free Money from Government Grants [...]

So again, a similar Google search for that specific piece of text. Check it out:

That's a lot of results. Affiliate pages, mostly. See how easy it is to get a piece of web copy up and running and start driving unsuspecting consumers towards the relentless claws of the grant scam beasts? The templates are apparently already available - most likely provided to the affiliates by the main grant scampanies.

The fact that some of those affiliates do not even bother to change the text and just set up a template-based site only adds to the insult in my opinion. It is a display of greed for quick cash with total disregard to the US consumers that fall for this scam. On the bright(er) side, because of stupid affiliate marketers like this finding these sites is a lot easier :)

Many of the results were spam comment postings unrelated blogs and sites, but there still is a considerable amount of grant scam affiliate sites that can be identified. Here is a list of all of the grant scam related domain names I extracted from the search results shown above :

1. grants-reviewed.org
2. top-grant-sites-reviewed.com
3. technodesk.net
4. secretfederalgrants.com [are you f#*&!_@ kidding me?]
5. treasurygrants.org
6. goverment-grants-review.net
7. mygrantreviews.com
8. governmentgrants4all.org
9. governmentgrantexposed.com
10. top5governmentgrants.com
11. grantfundingreviews.org
12. topgovernmentgrant2009.com
13. availablefreegrants.org
14. governmentgrantadviser.com
15. governmentgrantreview.org
16. govgrantreview.org

Needless to say, all of the above sites that are still active, i.e. running affiliate-to-scampany referral content, will be added to the grant scam site blacklist. If they are already listed as links above you can click the link to see the detail entry in the blacklist.