Free Money-Fact or Fiction

Free Money-Fact or Fiction

Scammers are everywhere you go these days.  From your common street scammer trying to convince you that the Rolex in his hand is the genuine, real deal, with real diamonds and everything, to the guy who keeps emailing you claiming to be a Nigerian prince who needs to forward millions of dollars to your bank account and, in exchange for this, he will let you keep some of it.  You can bet that once your friendly street salesman is out of sight that your genuine Rolex’s paint will start to flake off and the diamonds will start to get cloudy, and you can trust that your prince from Nigeria was probably not a prince, he was probably not from Nigeria, but he has surely emptied your entire bank account.  One of the biggest scam these days is the “free money” scam.  You would think that a offer for “free money” would be a huge red flag that screamed “SCAM” but there are even some extremely sharp folks who have fallen for the occasional “free money” scam or two, so there is no shame when it happens to you.  People who truly believe that there is free money out there are pretty persistent folks.

The true believers are amazingly persistent. “About six or eight years ago, there was a scam like this that produced a run of calls,” says the SBA’s Stamler. “The huckster at the heart of it implied that these grants were there, but the government didn’t want to let everyone know about them,” Stamler recalls. “He told people not to take ‘no’ for an answer when they called us.”

Rooney says he once ordered a “free-money” book advertised on television.The author claimed every entrepreneur was entitled to a government grant. Rooney received a directory of farmer’s subsidies, Housing & Urban Development programs, and government-loan applications.

What about those testimonials from happy entrepreneurs? Listen closely, Stamler says. They usually say they “got” so much government money for their small business — they don’t say how. Most of those featured entrepreneurs have gotten small-business loans, he says. The SBA guaranteed more than billion in loans during fiscal 1999 through its three major financing programs.