More Grant Scam Affiliate Deception: SecureGrants.com

A couple of months ago I wrote about the ultimate grant scam affiliate marketing deception in the form of the site verifiedgrants.com. I showed you how the site is a complete fake attempting to gain your trust, and how they use stock images, presenting the people in the images as their team of 'grant researchers'.

It appears that after publishing my article, the 'grant researchers' have mysteriously disappeared from the site. But wait, the front page still touts the friendly looking 'Glenn Ross':

Would it surprise you if I told you that 'Glenn Ross' is another fake? Well I guess it wouldn't.

Here is the stock image:

Boy does he look friendly. I guess that's why they picked him for their deceptive site.

A little more research into verifiedgrants.com led me to squidoo.com. Squidoo is an article submission site much like EzineArticles.com, allowing folks to create nuggets of 'knowledge' with the option of linking to their own sites. As discussed in the EzineArticles example, Squidoo in very much the same way provides affiliate marketers with a method for 'link building', i.e. creating 'related content' on a well-known site from where they can link to their affiliate sites via keyword-rich links (good for SEO purposes, or presumably so).

Behold:


Recognize the friendly face? Obviously this 'Squidoo Lens' is fillled with blah blah and strategically sprinkled keyword-rich links to verifiedgrants.com. While checking the link targets, I noticed that they also link to another site, securegrants.com :


Notice how the site has the same look and feel of verifiedgrants.com as well as trustedgrantsources.com? Well there's more that's very similar, yet different. How? Well here goes; image 1 is from verifiedgrants.com, where the lady used to be listed as 'Linda Markinson' (but like I mentioned, the 'team' was removed from the site soon after I posted my article exposing the scam), and image 2 is from securegrants.com, where the lady goes by 'Gayle Blanchard':
Gayle, Linda - whatever. Securegrants.com is another verified deceptive scam affiliate site trying to gain your trust with fake blog posts and tucked away links to genuine sources of grant related information in the hope that you will take the bait and follow their 'recommended programs' affiliate links to grant scam merchants.

In a follow-up post I will show you how to submit an official complaint with the FTC via the online FTC complaint assist tool - using this batch of willfully deceptive sites as an example.