Scammers Will Fake Anything and Everything

Let me show you this little "certificate" here, plastered all over the shady corners of the Internet called we critics call "the great fool pool", otherwise known as HYIP forums. HYIP, or "high yield investment programs", are basically Internet Ponzi schemes and/or ponzi/pyramid hybrid schemes where you are paid commission if you brought in people who pay into the program, and you get get extra money out of the program after X days, with promises of 1 to 2% interest per DAY.

Any way, here's the "certificate"

Notice anything wrong with it?

How about... Everything?




The border is generic "awards" border easily found on the Internet

The "seal" was overlaid later with Photoshop (tm). If you zoom in you can see the "light border" around the seal, indicating a "blending" effect.

The "purpose" of the shares is left extremely vague, indicating that this was never intended as a legal document. "Shares... in the above named company" Are we talking stocks or something else? It's NOT for just some random company to offer stocks for sale in the US without SEC registration, any way.

Articles of association is correct as only a few jurisdictions use "articles of incorporation". However, again, without the actual articles this is likely fake. And you certainly don't make one up over the Internet like this one.

The date and the ID number are generated by the computer, and those are clearly bogus. Date is real, but the ID number is likely fake. If you look online you can easily see that some other certificates have already reached a 9-digit number and is overflowing into the border itself. That would suggest the value of this company to be in the BILLIONS... and that is, frankly, bull****.   A far more likely scenario: the numbers are not consecutive.

Then there's the signature. The certificate was signed by a Rodney J Watson, so it claims.

Here's that signature by itself zoomed in 300%:



Notice something wrong? Yep... it does NOT say Rodney.

It actually says... R o b e r y    And the letter y's thickness does NOT match the first 5 letters.

As it turns out this fake is based on a real signature... Robert Gates' signature

Another Photoshop(tm) job.

EDIT: Oz over at BehindMLM decided to find out where the Y came from, and found this:



So what have we learned so far? Fake signature means this certificate ain't worth the bandwidth it was transmitted with. If you gave them $10 or whatever amount, good luck to you ever getting it back.