November 19, 2009

Horse 1050 - Erin's Amazing Grant Checks

I love it when spam comes through my inbox; I especially love it when the author of that spam clearly didn't bother to do any research at all. This then is said email:

http://www.erinsgrantblog.com/?c=au&aff=sg&id=vcsuc

My name is Erin and I'm from Sydney, Australia. I figured out a way to get free cash from grants. Here's the situation, each year billions in grants are given out to people like me and you. The thing is, most people don't think they qualify for a grant and never apply, this makes it easier for the people who actually try.

Below is a picture of the actual grant check I received in the mail:



Does anyone else see three critical errors with the email?

Firstly, before we even look at the the photograph itself, there is the certain problem of receiving a grant check from the government. We happen to live in Australia, and as such in Australia we don't actually have grant "checks", unless of course we are making sure something is correct, or perhaps threatening an opponent's king in chess. No, in Australia the instrument used to transfer monies from one person to another is a "cheque".

Since Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, the British Commonwealth more or less standardised its spelling of the word cheque, and the Americanism check didn't actually appear until Noah Webster's blatant vandalism of the English language with his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828

Oops.

Secondly, if you look at the picture supplied, this clearly does not look like any cheque ever written by the Reserve Bank of Australia. Grant Cheques would be brown in colour, they certainly do not feature the Australian flag on them, nor are they emblazoned with Maple Leaves and they most definately not endorsed by the Receiver General for Canada.

Oops.

Thirdly, if you follow any of the links within the website (and I do mean website, for although it does say Erin's Grant Blog, it clearly isn't a blog, since there are no new posts, none of them are dated etc.) you are redirected to:

http://www.successgrants.com/index.php

This website is plastered with the American Flag, the White House, and Benjamin Franklin's face smiling at us from several US $100 bills (I used that term in deference to the fact that in Australia, a banknote is a note and not a bill, since a bill is essentially a demand notice to pay).

Oops.

So Miss Erin Jones (if that is indeed your real name), quite contrary to what you have suggested in that "If I can save you some time and grief, the stuff I did here is free to get started and took me a long time to research." you haven't done any research at all. In fact, me with barely 8 seconds of "research" have concluded, that your blog (which isn't a blog at all) is a) trying to sell me something and b) a great steaming pile of electronic kaka.

Of course it does suggest that the fact that I'm finding holes in spam, must mean that today is a very boring day indeed.

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