Rogue reef site is taken down
A web site seeking to cash in on the Tourism Queensland “Best Job In The World” promotion was closed down over the weekend.
The site, which claimed to have been put together by a girl called Jess, purported to be raising funds to go to the Reef because she thought she wouldn’t win the competition to be a caretaker on the Islands of the Barrier Reef. It provided a Paypal account for people to send donations.
However, because of the links to the official site, and speed with which it was put up, there were suspicions that it was a below-the-radar element of the main campaign.
But this was denied by Tourism Queensland, which also admitted on Friday that some of the early video entries for the competition had been faked.
The unofficial web site site has now vanished, and it now carries a message from blogging platform WordPress saying: “This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our terms of service”.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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I read the blog just two days back. She said she had collected something around $8,000 from family and friends, and she wanted $35,000 as I remember.
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Hi Jim,
I’m not sure I believed her about the $8k figure though!
Cheers,
Tim
Join the club ‘Jess”, wouldn’t we all love someone to give us money to go to the Reef
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