Advantage America Benefits Called and offered me a grant for $12,500 and wanted my personal information. ripoff Winter Park Florida...
I got a call the other day from an organization calling itself Advantage America Benefits (AdvantageAmericaBenefits.com).
While he spoke decent English, the man I talked to had an accent that sounded either East Indian or Philipino. He said his name was "Mark Anderson" that he was working with the Resurgence Department of the U.S. Government (which does not exist) and he wanted to give me a $12,500 grant because my family had been selected among of 6,000 families who fit certain criteria. I was, of course, immediately suspicious. While I know the U.S. government does in fact give grants to qualifying families, I also know that the government does not advertise these grants for fear of social indignation.
I asked him lots of questions. All of which he did a great job of answering. The rudeness was what kept me on the phone. In my experience government employees (from DMV to General Service) are rude and always seem fed up with life. I was also impressed that he was able to give:
website:
http://advantageamericabenefits.com
Address:
1900 Howell Branch Road
Suite #4-7
Winter Park, FL 32792
Phone Number:
866-503-7345
In retrospect that is nothing to be impressed about as ANYONE can set all those things up quite easily. Further these scammers aren't even that good, because they called me the next day after I'd hung up on them with a vendetta to expose the grant fraud scheme.
I must admit they almost had me until I decided to do a Google search on Advantage American Benefits and stumbled across the Rip Off Report.coms take on Advantage America Benefits.
I've read on the Rip Off Report that these guys are from Bali or India, but they maybe in Canada because the IP address is in Canada:
OrgName: Groupe iWeb Technologies inc.
OrgID: GIT-20
Address: 3185, rue Hochelaga
City: Montreal
StateProv: QC
PostalCode: H1W-1G4
Country: CA
What is Advantage America Benefits IP ADDRESS?
That is easy ---> 209.172.34.215
How did I find that out?
Pinged their DNS name like this:
With ARIN.NET, I attempted to grab a name affiliated with Advantage America Benefits. But Advantage American Benefits was apparently smart enough to pay extra with IWEB Technologies (the hosting company they use) to get a privately listed domain.
How can we take them down?
Email their Webhost IWEB Technologies and file a complaint if you have been wronged.
Contact Info:
OrgAbuseHandle: CME15-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Mertes, Cyrille
OrgAbusePhone: +1-514-286-4242
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@iweb.caThis site is hosed by IWeb Technologies. Their abuse email is abuse-report@iweb.ca.
Send an email to any and every Fraud Reporting, Rip off alerting and news site you can think of.
I'm still digging up information on this criminal, international scam organization. In the meantime here are lots of accounts of American citizens being ripped off by Advantage America Benefits:
Advantage America Benefits SCAMS
The ugly truth is that many of the online grant programs are consumer scams. Holiday scams are especially bad because it is a time when we all want to buy gifts. I've noticed a rise in these international scammers using a combination of telemarketing fraud, phishing and mail fraud techniques. Last year a phisher from Nigeria attempted to get a free cell phone from me on ebay using fake Western Union emails and real Fedex reciepts. The attacks are getting more sophisticated.
