Get your (not-so) free grant money

By Chadwick Matlin

updated 8:06 p.m. ET Feb. 25, 2009

Meet Kevin Hoeffer. Kevin is an altruistic man who just received $12,759.62 from the federal government. He wants all of the readers of his blog to be able to do the same. So he points the way to a free grant kit (plus $1.99 shipping and handling) to use to apply for a government handout. Once you do that, you'll get your $12,000. It's that simple. He even provides a copy of his official Treasury grant check to prove its legitimacy (see above.)

Sure, the name on the check is a little fuzzy ... but he was probably just protecting his identity! And how can you distrust a "proud firefighter and family man" and a Texan through and through? The photo makes him look like an all-American boy who met the woman of his dreams and started a family.

Kevin is not alone in his fortune. Meet Tom Donahue, a "proud firefighter and family man" born and raised in New York, who is also a grant recipient. Judging by the photo on Tom's site, he's Kevin's estranged twin. We'd run the image, but you can just look above at Kevin's — it appears to be the exact same as Tom's.

But please don't confuse him with Jeff Donahue, who also got a fuzzy grant check. And then there's Joe Hoeffer (Kevin's brother?), a man with the same face and the same blog layout as Kevin, Tom, and Jeff. Mike Russo, too. And Sam Kelley. And Ben Karlson.

And in case you thought this incestuous Web ring was sexist, there's also a place for Mary Cestaro, the "proud business woman by day and a wonderful wife by night" of all these doppelgängers.

The Big Money The photo makes Kevin Hoeffer look like an all-American boy who met the woman of his dreams and started a family. But is he even real?

These people are the faces of a new, pervasive scam that's piggybacking on Washington's stimulus agenda. All of the blogs tell you to use the free software to get the $12,000 grants. To order that software, the blogs link off-site to a variety of Web sites filled with testimonials about how great their free grant-finding software is. What they don't say is that if you fail to cancel your subscription — a subscription the sites don't reveal exists outside — they'll charge your credit card until you discover their scheme and tell them to stop. (The going rate seems to be $50-$70.) It's a devious system whose ads are proliferating across the Internet and has embarrassed Facebook into pulling them down. A close read of the scams' semiotics offers an insight not just to our weakness for get-rich-quick schemes, but also our current economic moment.

These grant sites have been around for many years, but they're now enjoying a resurgence. The political rhetoric in Washington has all but equated the phrase stimulus check with free grant. Thus, the opportunity for these scam sites has emerged. Links to the blogs have been filtered into text ad networks, which mean they can appear on any Web site using third-party ad suppliers. And with the ad market suffering across the Web, there's more and more likelihood that this riffraff will bubble to the top, since scammers are the ones with money to burn on advertising budgets these days.

Case in point: Just now I was reading an e-mail from the White House on Obama's address to Congress. Gmail's sponsored link that ran on top of the mail led to obamaseconomicstimulus.com, another gateway blog with a blurred check and a relatable story.

At this point, the tag line on the ad should sound familiar: "Read How I Got a $12k Check From The New Economic Stimulus Package." It almost sounds like news from an RSS feed.

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