I wish this was me, but all glory must go to the Hypnotoad and my friend who goes by RomeroLand. He originally posted this piece on another forum, and I am re-posting it here.
Long story short, or is it short story long? Anyways, I received two postcards in the mail explaining that I can visit a website to get my absentee ballot. Absentee ballot? What the Fark? It's Oct 27th and the election is less than a week away!
Note to anyone reading this, don't Farking follow their instructions. Two options;
- throw it away or
- have fun doing internet detective work.
I chose the latter.
Both postcards were large and full color. Very generic language about democracy and rights yadda yadda.
http://img5.imageshack.us/...
http://img207.imageshack.us/...
http://img87.imageshack.us/...
http://img253.imageshack.us/...
I apologize for my camera, it's a piece of shiat. I also shopped my personal info out, but the relevant info is still there.
First off, why am I receiving a postcard to get an absentee ballot within a week of an election? Ah yes, to make me think I'm getting one so I don't go on election day. Got it.
- Why does the website address have my name listed? And why does the postcard look like it's fed through a printer? Good question! I must be important!
C) The pre-postage stamp says it's a non-profit organization but the website is a dot com. I also see Illinois and Cincinnati listed. I also see the North Carolina state image in the background. This is so very ODD!
Knowing me, I hate this fraud crap and thus began my internet detective work. I went to the website listed in the postcard, except I didn't put my name at the end like it told me to. I just wanted to see the main page. Oops. that page cannot be found. How in the world can't I get to the main page of the website? Weird. So, instead of typing my name as they asked, I typed johnsmith. Wow, the website popped up with the address of some poor soul named John Smith and even had a welcome message.
So I tried georgebush. Yep, it worked, except not the GB we know. It's some guy in another State. I even tried johnlsmith (using a middle initial) and it was someone different.
It goes on and on. But the main thing I saw was the website now had a message that said at the bottom "paid for by the Alliance of America's Future."
http://allianceforamericasfuture.org/
So off to another website to see who the Fark these people are. Aha! It's a generic page again with nothing to do. Ok, I'm at a dead end. So I check the whois on that website and see that it's registered to a "Mary Cheney" of "Drums, PA." Cheney?? So I wiki Cheney and realize that Mary Cheney is related to Dick.
Long story short, these motherFarkers are purposely sending out mailers close to election time so people request absentee ballots. They'll never get the ballots and realize that after election day (since they missed it waiting for the ballots), they never got to vote in the first place.
I've never seen a scam this pathetic but I'm sure people are falling for it. Let your friends know that absentee ballots NEED to be requested from your county clerk or official, not from a mailer.
I submitted this information to my local news station in hopes that either the culprits get uncovered or that people don't get fooled by it.
So there you have it. I have a hard time believing that anyone in the Cheney family would be foolish enough to have their name attached to something so fraudulent, but stranger things have happened.
**UPDATE**
And then it gets thicker...
Doing a bit of searching on allianceforamericasfuture.org I come across a lot of references to democracydependsonyou.com. The whois info for that site is:
Registrant: BKM Group 14 West Oak Street Alexandria, Virginia 22301 United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com) Domain Name: DEMOCRACYDEPENDSONYOU.COM
Created on: 13-Sep-10
Expires on: 13-Sep-13
Last Updated on: 20-Sep-10
Administrative Contact:
bennett, Barry barry@jeanschmidt.com
BKM Group
14 West Oak Street
Alexandria, Virginia 22301
United States
(703) 566-9068 Fax --
Technical Contact:
bennett, Barry barry@jeanschmidt.com
BKM Group
14 West Oak Street
Alexandria, Virginia 22301
United States
(703) 566-9068 Fax --
BKM Group is way too general to find any meaningful results but jeanschmidt.com? Humm, that's Congresswoman Jean Schmidt's (R-OH) website and Barry Bennett is her campaign manager/chief of staff/floor wax/dessert topping.
Oh, and what's this?
http://www.dailykos.com/...
So yeah... wow. I'm kind of baffled on this one. Either Mr. Bennett is incredibly bad at the internet or someone is trying to make it look like he is.