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Comment by jwesley | Hacker News Reader

Yea, those grant offers are run by affiliate marketers. It's a major scam. Basically they offer to send you information on grants for the cost of shipping (like $4.99 or so) and then charge your credit card for $90 a couple weeks later.

FB banned diet related scams from their ad programs a few weeks ago, so I'd expect them to ban these types of offers as well once the word gets out. These types of scams are the internet's dirty little secret. Google, Yahoo, et al have no problem letting people advertise them either.

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You know, I am always surprised there isn't more of this going on. Not just online, everywhere. CCs are just not a great solution to remote or cashless payments.

They are when you use a good CC company. I've had AMEX charge-back numerous deadbeat merchants and automated payment BS. They even got me $1,500 back from Paypal, which is basically a black hole for your money.

Which is the other end of the problem: deadbeat customers charging back.

Ironically, that is probably one of the things keeping back ecommerce. The cost of this purchase security is a very high cost to retailers. I've heard some say that chargeback costs (including software, security mechanisms customer service staff calling customers, verifying liaising with police, etc.) amount to about 10% -20%.

The CCs, being oligopolistic monstrosities can secure customers, but that doesn't mean the system works well.

This one is a monthly re-occurring charge of $58.61 (sort of an odd number, maybe they hope it blends in?):

> "If you have not cancelled the free bonus within the 7 day trial period (if offered on product purchasing), you are agreeing to purchase the bonus material and/or service at a monthly reoccurring cost. The resource center is billed at $58.61 monthly."

(That's hidden in the terms, not on the sales page.)

FB banned diet related scams from their ad programs a few weeks ago,

Do you have any links on this? I'm seeing more and more info about the scams ... just wondering if FB has issued an official statement.

This thread on WickedFire mentions the post on HN and predicts Grants offers with soon be banned too:

http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/50846-get-your...

It was on the same forum I read about diet offers getting banned. I don't think there was any official statement by Facebook on the matter.

Hey there hypocrite. You have your own weight loss domains. And ever better, you have several spammy websites about online colleges. They may not be right, but neither are you.

Evidence?

These are all just restructured wiki articles. Not selling anything yet, though probably eventually going up for sale since there's no other plausible reason for their existance. http://abutterdish.com/ http://bodyfatgone.com/ Also owns Affiliatehunt.com if there was any doubt he's an affiliate. He has a fair number of domains so I'm not going to list them all. They're pretty much all the same thing as those 2 though. There's a few like http://degreeaccess.com/ that are just markoved text. I'm not going to out any real domains, but those are enough to get the idea.

But how do you know they are jwesley's?

Jwesley has 1 submission in his history. universitiesandcolleges.org. I have a domaintools account that shows in the past it had the whois of "John Wesley"(it's on private whois now). But w/o the paid service,just to prove my point: Check the IP of the other domains I mentioned (abutterdish.com for example). Those both resolve to the same IP as universitiesandcolleges.org and are not on private whois. And what do you see as the registrant? "John Wesley". He's a fair amount of the domains on that IP actually.

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