he's good.. I think the "fake cheque" was probably a PR stunt.. For IMers to spread around and expse shoemoney to their user base. Pretty smart. the picture was obviously some sort of parody and meant to be fake, the shadow and reflections aside.. the cheque was a straight up copy paste onto the image, with no effort made to make the image look real (lighting, resolution, crease/folds etc)
I never heard of this guy before, but I came across his stunt pic on another IM forum, and now I've come across it again on his "rebuttal" on another IM forum. So it definately worked.
Furthermore, he probably submitted the image to failblog, lol
Btw, you can tell from the video editing, hd camera set up, the fact that he has at least one other person in his team.. that's he's making a reasonable amount of money.