Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2014, and reports news from that month, including Trudeau’s 10-year sentence. The remark about the Fulfix article bringing tens of thousands of visits refers to the old site’s traffic at the time.
Kevin Trudeau, the star of late-night infomercials, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for defrauding consumers with his products, which ranged from cures for baldness to miraculous weight loss. His latest bestseller, The Weight Loss Cure “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, has brought him $40 million in profits.
US authorities had warned him repeatedly to stop broadcasting that kind of misleading advertising, but Trudeau violated the order by airing the infomercial up to 32,000 more times, claiming that the government was trying to stop the book from being published precisely because it worked so well. That only pushed sales up again. Everyone wanted to learn the secret that the government and the medical community didn’t want people to know.
The question that still puzzles the authorities is how people keep falling for these old, well-known “cheap marketing” tricks aimed at people of limited intelligence. Trudeau is just one more example of the many ads that still work today with lines such as “scientists were stunned by this discovery and will do everything they can to keep you from finding out about it” or “the secret to getting rich that millionaires have kept hidden for years”.
And my favourite is the photo of a muscular man or a woman straight off the catwalk who supposedly got those bodies thanks to a technology that Hollywood stars’ coaches have kept hidden, and of which only a limited number of units are on sale.
“But you must call right now (at 4:20 in the morning), because we can’t promise there will be units left. But wait, there’s more: if you call in the next 20 minutes, you’ll get a second unit free for the same price. Don’t miss this opportunity, which science has kept from you for years because it works so miraculously well.”
This kind of cheap advertising and marketing is now jumping from late-night infomercials to social media. One example is the “miracle” baldness cure Fulfix, whose article has drawn tens of thousands of visits, which shows there are hundreds of thousands of interested people who still haven’t realised that there are no miracle cures for baldness.
In the same way, we see the product that has left science open-mouthed, illustrated with a photo of a muscular man carrying 7 kilos of Photoshop, all thanks to a miracle product that trainers have jealously guarded because they didn’t want you to know about it.
These snake-oil sellers of cosmetic miracles and get-rich-quick schemes hide behind their advertising a line that shouldn’t still work and should even be offensive. The only thing they don’t want you to know is that they are looking for a fool to take the bait.
And sadly, plenty of victims keep falling for it and spending their money on products that, at best, do nothing at all. At worst, they can put your health at risk.
Further reading
- The Facebook smartphone giveaway scam (more dangerous than we feared)
- Holland Performance Telecom: a profitable empire of fraud
- Some traits make you more likely to fall for a scam
Featured image: RailbirdJAM at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
