Ben Bernanke’s Payday Loan Shack? No, not yet, anyway. However, apparently enough people are falling for a scam consumer bailout to necessitate a Federal Reserve press release:

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday alerted the public to instances of questionable solicitations directed at consumers. These solicitations promise consumers access to personal loans through a nonexistent Federal Reserve lending program.

Under this fraudulent scheme, targeted individuals are told that that they can work through a broker to access a Federal Reserve program that extends sizable secured loans to consumers. Consumers are encouraged to deposit large sums of money into a bank account, under the guise of a security deposit, in order to receive the purported loan.

Come on, we all know that unless you’ve filled out the paperwork to register yourself as a bank holding company, you aren’t going to get any money from the Fed. The other tipoff should be that the scammers requested actual cash as a deposit. If they’d requested upside-down mortgages, an AMC Gremlin and your non-winning scratch-off lottery tickets, it would have been much more believable (if nowhere near as lucrative).