Is "teabonics" fake?

[Final-Fan]

Kasz216 said:

Final-Fan said:

Kasz216 said:

Final-Fan said:

Kasz216 said:
Why wouldn't there have been any investigation into it?  Seems like prime pickings for a journalist.  Espeically on a slow news day?

If you were conned with a forgery... you wouldn't want your money back?

Well, then you should be able to find out easily enough if that's the case. 

Sure you'd want your money back, whether the "you" is McRae or whatever other people that were involved in this project and possibly bankrolling it.  But maybe you'd want even more to avoid public embarrassment, or the risk of discrediting the Kenyan Birth hypothesis.  To some people letting ten or twenty grand go uncontested would be a small price to pay for avoiding public humiliation, let alone the sinking of a beloved political position.  And be honest, how likely would they really be to get their money back?  Not very (to put it mildly) is my guess. 

If I was a reporter and could pay for my own expenses that way sure.
I'm not though, and I don't care enough to spend my own money.
There GDP per capita is like... $300.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gro_nat_inc_percap-gross-national-income-per-capita
The files being fake wouldn't discredit anything.  Just because something is fake doesn't mean the real stuff doesn't exist. 

What I MEANT was, if it was such an attractive thing to do for reporters surely you should be able to dig up a reporter who had done that in this case. 

And I know that evidence getting faked doesn't mean the thing it supposedly proved is false.  But are you seriously going to tell me that the Kenyan Birth hypothesis wouldn't lose respect if he came out complaining of getting duped like that?  Are you going to LIE to me? 

And be honest, how likely would they really be to get their money back?  Not very (to put it mildly) is my guess.

Unless they looked into it and it turned out there never was any money paid.

Then you don't have a story.  It's like if you look into if Joe Biden's wife was really killed by a drunk driver.  She wasn't, it was easy to check, and the story got told because he wasn't drunk.  Now if he HAD been drunk... there is no story.

Why would they lose respect?  I mean, would YOU be able to tell a Kenyian birth certificate from a fake one?  Probably not unless it was badly forged.  The only way they'd lose respect would be if they took the documents to the public as the real deal before having them confirmed by an outside source or had experts looking at them.

Purely aquiring the documents wouldn't lead to any degredation of their point at all.

As for how likely they'd be to get there money back, can't say I'm not an expert on Kenyian law.

I can accept that they might not report it as its own story, although I'd be surprised if they kept such information completely to themselves.  However, I'd think there would be planty of opportunities to put it in as part of a larger piece on this topic, or just throw it out there as one of those unexciting facts on the Internet on their blog or whatever.  The fact is that you are ASSUMING this was in fact investigated and the result was negative.  You have no basis for that beyond your assertion "it would be easy to check this and a journalist would be very interested in doing so".  And I remain unconvinced that it would be as easy as you imply.  The guy who would have gotten the money is in Kenya, and the money in the States could have come from any number of sources. 

People would say "look at them, they are so desperate to believe it's a conspiracy that they got duped by an African email scam"?

And seriously.  I'm not either, but I think it's highly likely that the money would burn a hole right through this guy's pocket if he's a scammer, and as you implied with your statistics they'd be unlikely to recover the funds through wage garnishing etc. even supposing they got through the fuss of international prosecution and so on.