More Foreigners Cashing in on US Consumers

While working on the grant scam site blacklist, I encountered yet another company across the pond trying to sell their "Grant kit" or "Grant CD" to consumers in the United States. In previous posts we already met the following other foreign grant scam entities and individuals (follow links for blacklist entries):

• grants360.com - operated by a scampany called 'Media Ltd' in the United Kingdom
  
• govgrantsreport.com & grantsreport.net - affiliate-to-scamhole sites operated by a guy in Greece
• Grant Seeker Secrets and many other sites run by a scampany called JRS Media Solutions, located in the Philippines
• Earncashfromgrants.com & Govgrantsdirect.com, operated by a scampany in Cyprus
  

The latest addition to this list of foreign operations is Efamily Network Ltd, located in the United Kingdom. It's a bit of a journey, but I found out about them when looking at another grant scam site, usfinancialresources.com:

The domain usfinancialresources.com is privately registered, but from the contact us page it shows that they are located in Nevada

Customer Service by phone: 1-866-549-6225
By email: support@usfinancialresources.com
By US Mail: 871 Coronado Center Dr., Suite 200, Henderson, NV 89052

The US Financial Resources page links to a page at securepaysystems.com (url: https://www.securepaysystems.com/offers/usfr.html), which obviously aroused my curiosity. A Google search for [inurl:securepaystems.com grant] shows some interesting links on page one of the results:

The first link leads to this page (url: https://www.securepaysystems.com/offers/polaroid.html?c=SRD&r=):


If you look at the terms and conditions of this page, it shows you the regular stuff but it also appears that this specific 'offer' is via grantfundingsource.com and 'membership site' grantfundingsource.net. Here is the homepage of grantfundingsource.com:

The footer of this page clearly shows (highlighted) the following address:

eFamily Network Ltd,
11 Kite, Close,
Hartford,
Huntingdon PE29 1UY,
United Kingdom

Interesting. Let's do some Googling [11 Kite Close, Hartford, Huntingdon PE29 1UY, United Kingdom grant] :


Wow. The eFamily family of sites has a lot of grant related material it seems. And this is only page one of the Google search results.

A similar search for just the address shows that from the same location - a modest looking duplex in a friendly neighborhood - a company by the name of 'EventCo online Ltd' runs a bunch of porn sites.

Let me remind you, this is a company in the UK creating US Grant related sites specifically targeting US Consumers with the intent to defraud them.

But wait, there's more.

A whois lookup of grantfundingsource.com shows an IP of 209.90.75.101 - for those not in the know that would be the IP address assigned to the server running the site. A web server can run multiple web sites that all resolve to the same IP address, a very common scenario in hosting environments. With an IP to domain lookup tool like this one, you can easily find all domain names that use the same IP address.

I should note that the only thing you can be certain about is that all of the web sites whose domain names appear in the list are using the same IP address; it does not necessarily mean they all belong to the same individual or company. However, it is fairly easy in this case to verify that all the offending domain names belong to the same company scampany.

I filtered out domain names that have nothing to do with grants. Here is what's left:

Why would a company in the United Kingdom have all of these US Grant related domain names? Because it is easier to fool people if you have all of these. Many people will think that a different domain name with a different looking web site means a different company. They may even get conned multiple times like this. Efamily Media Ltd can also rotate their content using the different domain names so as to camouflage their actions - and it seems that that is exactly what they are doing.

Most of the domain names listed are 'dormant' - they redirect to some innocent looking portal. The ones that do work, though, are typical grant scam sites:

myfundingguide.com

myfundingconsultant.com

grantfundingmadeeasy.com

freemoney.grantfundingsource.com

usgrantsuccess.com

morefundingsources.com

And they may have a bunch more, who knows.

Update 03-29-09: Yep, found another one:

grantconsultant.com

Some of these sites appear to differ in terms of monthly fees and specific conditions, others appear to be near-exact copies of the same thing. Somehow they are all interconnected, I could not put my finger on it yet.

So there you have it, another foreign scampany trying to cash in scamming US Consumers.