Swift Results, FTC Style

A little over a month ago, the FTC Office of Public Affairs held a press conference to issue a warning against stimulus grant scams. During the press conference, they discussed how the economic stimulus package as initiated by the Obama administration led to an unprecedented increase in grant scam sites leading people to believe that they were eligible for a chunk of government-provided money, combined with an equal increase in online advertising leading to these sites.

During the press conference, the speaker mentioned that the FTC was reaching out to the industry and was working closely with several media / advertising companies. We were told that Facebook - whose PR team decided showing up and publicly patting itself on the back would be a good thing -, Google and several unnamed others, were working with the FTC to help investigate and where possible get rid of these grant scamvertisers.

Swift results were the announced expectation:

"We have seen a lot of ads on the Google for these stimulus scams and ask them to help. This morning, Google has committed to investigate these ads for the anti-this is policy and to identify these sites. As we are talking, we are following up on that offer and expect swift results."

[Quote from (terrible) FTC transcript]

I have certainly seen a recent decrease in Obama-related and stimulus related advertising on Google. In fact, as far as I can see most of this type ads have disappeared. But it should not matter whether a grant scam or affiliate site advertises itself with 'Obama Grants Free' , 'Stimulus Grants for You', 'Government Grants Now' or 'Free Government Grants'.

Whatever method they use in their advertising, the scam is the exact same, and the FTC should not stop pursuing these grant scam companies.

Earlier today, I added site #54 to the blacklist. This particular site was one I failed to list before but is one of the major players in the grant scam scheme, grossing an estimated 3.5 to 4 MILLION dollars in the first couple of months in 2009. It is not unlikely that most of the 900K visitor count traffic was driven to the site by greed-over-ethics type affiliates.

So what have the 'swift results' as expected by the FTC been like? Let's have a look.

Here are some of the ads from the first couple of pages of Google search results for 'grants':







As you can see, most of the ads shown above lead to sites that I consider to be part of the grant scam scheme, and most of the sites are on the grant scam site blacklist (those that aren't will be).

But of course, Google is not the only PPC advertising network. Let's have a look at Yahoo search sponsored listings (again, search term is 'grants'):








As you can see, Yahoo is still inundated with ads like this too. Many of the Yahoo scamvertisers are promoting sites that I had not seen before, and needless to say I will be adding those to the grant scam site blacklist.

I presume that one of the companies the FTC did not want to name in their press conference - I have no idea why - is Yahoo, and again we see the very poor results so far. And these are only the ads from pages 1 through 3.

Last but not least, this ad hoc grant scam PPC ad gallery would not be complete without ads as found on Microsoft Live Search:







Not much different from the other two advertising giants. Again, some new sites popped up that I had not seen before, so those ... yeah, you guessed it.

The ad galleries above show you the results of 'swift results' FTC style, about 5 weeks after they announced their action plan. I do not know whether the very poor results are the result of the industry not cooperating, a lack of authority, an understaffed FTC, or the fact that Jupiters eye is shrinking. Either way, I am not pleased with the results.

The FTC should speed up their 'swift results' action plan implementation and summon the industry for a debrief. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should abandon their 'let's make some more money' mindset for this one and start actively monitoring for these kinds of ads; they should refuse to accept ads that link to grant scam sites. Period.

@Google @MS @Yahoo @FTC: If you need some leads, start here. Yeah, this post.