I know that one shouldn’t be surprised at anything found on the internet, but even so one occasionally trips over a new level of idiocy that one had previously thought unachievable. And so I came upon an advertisement that promised thousands of dollars in grants from the Australian government. And here is the photo of the cheque allegedly received…

As someone who has received actual cheques from the Australian government, I can assure readers that this looks nothing like the real thing. Notice, if you will, the amateur photoshopping that placed an Australian flag on the cheque. There is no flag on Australian government cheques. And right next to the flag is “Government of Canada/Gouvernement du Canada” instead of the far more probable “Reserve Bank of Australia.”

So, in the interest of research, I followed the link to a blog called “Erin’s Grant Blog” where Erin, a surprisingly photogenic young woman with a well-off young family, exhorts readers to follow her lead and claim absurd sums of money handed out by the government for no apparent reason. She also has a photograph of the cheque she received.

This time the photoshopper has been smart enough to put Australia at the top of the cheque, but now the flag has changed places! And the dollar amount is written in both English and French, which is odd given that French is neither an official language nor widely spoken in Australia. Could it be that this is the same cheque from Canada? Why, yes it is. The right hand side reveals, despite the photoshopper’s inept effort to defocus it, that the cheque has been signed by the Gaussblurreur General for Canada.

I’ve submitted a scam report to the ACCC. Let’s see what comes of it.

Tags: australia, bad photoshopping, canada, cheque, government grant scam, scam