International Grants online

A friend (Gaylene Middleton from the New Zealand Humanists) contacted me on the weekend as she had been messaged by one of her Facebook friends about a Government Grants assistance program she is apparently eligible to receive funds from. She immediately looked up the name of the program - Federal Grant For Family Home And Care Support (FGHS) - and found an article warning that it was a scam, and then she messaged me to double check and because she thought I may be interested in it. Here are the messages she received from her FB friend, which she passed on to me (apologies for the really bad grammar):

_“I hope you would have heard or gotten any on your about the FGHS program yet ?”

“They are selecting familiarity and name with to help families selected I saw your name on their list when they came to my house to delivered mine that is why I contacted you....Do you know their website?”_

The messages were accompanied by a link to a Facebook account called “Government Grant Funds”:

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100079445156633

The account had a profile image that appears to have been used in scams dating back to at least 2009, and is an image of Fred Smith, the owner of FedEx:

A google search for “FGHS” then led me to a set of dodgy looking Facebook accounts and blogs:

From what I can tell, the scam seems to involve first pulling someone in by messaging them about winning a grant, and then directing them to a Facebook page or blog online (like the ones above) where the scammers post an official-looking “personalised” congratulations where they talk, in broken English and ALL CAPS, about your funds/grant/winnings and how you can claim them.

Of course, as this is an international money transfer, receiving your money isn't simple, and the posts talk about the “clearance fee” you'll have to pay to enable the transfer. And that's the scam - you pay the fee, and then next up there's another administrative issue that needs a small payment before you can access your cash, and so on.

(Savvy people might argue that they could just take the transfer fee out of the money you've won, but the scammers usually have some story about how this can't be done because it's a different department, or because the money is in the form of a cashier's cheque and can't be broken down, or some other semi-plausible sounding reason)

It goes without saying that you'll never receive your money. The scammers will take as much as possible from you, string you along for as long as they can, and then stop responding when you stop giving them money.

One interesting part of this is that real people on Facebook appear to be propagating this scam. It doesn't look like the scammers are using hacked accounts, and my friend received a Facebook voice call from their would-be scammer, suggesting that the person owning the account is the one responsible for pushing this scam. I suspect that maybe at least some of the people who are trying to involve others in the scam have been scammed themselves, and may have been told that they will receive their money once they've helped to “inform” a few other people that they've also been awarded a grant. For many people who don't have much of a disposable income, if they've already sunk a few hundred dollars in a scam like this, and if they still believe that the money exists, they'd be likely to do almost anything to recoup their loss.

This scam appears to be an evolution of the Nigerian 419 email scams, which told you that you had been chosen to receive millions of dollars from a dead wealthy African leader - but that you needed to pay an administrative fee to the bank to release the funds. Back in the days when these were rife, people who had been scammed in some cases were known to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from their employers in order to pay the outstanding “fees” to access their new-found fortune. Sadly this fallacy of sunk costs is a powerful motivator for people to keep making the same mistake over and over.