The Lord of the Rants, Part 2
Getting Scammed Is As American As Apple Pie
3 ways to spot a Snake Oil salesman
If you think you’re not a sucker for fake remedies and get-rich-quick schemes, guess again.
According to the Federal Trade Commission:
…nearly 11% of U.S. adults, or an estimated 25.6 million people, had paid for fraudulent products and services in 2011. The most-reported frauds involved weight loss products, prize promotions, unauthorized billing for buyer’s clubs or internet services, and work at home programs.
That doesn’t even include people who get scammed or are victims of identity theft.
In a 2019 survey of 2000 Americans, “…63 percent of those studied revealed they have, unfortunately, been a victim of a scam, like falling for a romance request or transferring money to someone they’ve never met.” In addition, 49% have been victims of a data breach.
Your parents warned you about “stranger danger” since you could walk, so why are so many people getting phished by hackers or sending money to Nigerian princes?
Here are three rules to determine if you’re being asked to buy snake oil, regardless of whether that person sincerely believes their own bullshit or they are sociopaths who don’t display the emotional tells of people with a conscience.
Rule #1: The seller’s only source of credibility is based on claims of how much money they have made.
Let us consider the claims of a hypothetical, orange-tinted gelatinous bag of hot air.
How would you react to the following claims of credibility?
- A consistent track record of failure in business, with multiple bankruptcies and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax write-offs.
- Countless court records of lawsuits by customers who have been defrauded, or by partners and vendors whose contracts have been broken.
- Consistently outrageous public statements that can easily be proven false.
For the majority of people, this mountain of evidence would be sufficient to determine that such a person would be far from an unimpeachable source of wisdom.
And yet, this hypothetical person — okay who am I kidding? you already know who I’m talking about — pretending to be president has a cult of 50 million followers so blinded by his bullshit that he could make the following claim (which might be the only true thing he’s ever said):
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” — Agent Orange
No crime, act of treason, high misdemeanor, or admission of pussy-grabbing guilt could shake the power that Genghis Tang holds over his followers.
So why is the White House so worried about the current investigation?
It is because investigators could subpoena records from Deutsche Bank.
That is the only investigation Cheeto Jesus fears: one that will disclose his true financial situation.
If the public found out that Herr Drumpf was not a billionaire and owed the Russians massive amounts of money, his hold over his flock would be broken.
When you read articles that shout “I made $11,369 this month from writing, and you can, too,” how many of these fools have shown you their monthly balance statement?
And for those narcissists who want to tell you how much they’ve made the previous year, where are their redacted tax forms?
Of course, scam artists could always doctor their paperwork using Photoshop. Look how easy it was for me.
The big corporate criminals, like Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay (Enron), and Lehman Brothers, do this all the time.
But for the small-time snake oil salesman — self-help gurus, success coaches and anyone who promises to teach you their method of getting rich quick — falsifying documents creates evidence of fraud which could eventually be used against them in court.
The best defense of a snake oil salesman is the personal claim to believe in what they are selling. As soon as they falsify documents, there is clear evidence of intent to commit fraud.
“It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious readily provable offense.”
— Jeff Sessions (Attorney General)
And small-time snake oil salesmen don’t have the resources to retain a legal defense team.
Anyone who tries to sell you get-rich-quick schemes or training based on their claims of how much money they’ve made is nothing more than a mini-Trump.
Anyone up for a drink?
Rule #2: The seller ignores easily researched, common scientific knowledge.
In the 19th century, corn flakes were invented to stop people from masturbating, Coca-Cola was marketed as a temperance drink intended as a patient medicine, and cocaine was promoted as a tonic to cure depression and sexual impotence.
As science continues to increase human knowledge, no one would continue to make those kinds of outrageous claims today, or they would face criminal prosecution.
Why should it be different for other areas of human behavior?
There are countless examples of self-help articles on this writing platform where writers make the same kind of false statements.
I found one particularly egregious example of this, where one of our social media rock stars made the following claim:
Your past is whatever you ascribe meaning to. You can remember the gains, or you can remember the pain. Post-traumatic growth is the opposite of PTSD. You could have any negative experience imaginable and become better from it. This may take time, but if you are conscious about your emotions and conscious about your future, then you can turn any negative experience into a lot of gain.
After doing a two-minute online search on PTSD, I found three medical sources that verified the following:
Bridges to Recovery: “Like most mental illnesses, PTSD is not strictly curable. This condition is caused by trauma and causes serious symptoms that make normal functioning challenging or impossible. Treatment with special types of therapy and sometimes medication can make a big difference, but it is not a cure.”
If the author had written a disclaimer stating his advice is for people trying to get ahead in their careers, and that this does not apply to PTSD, I wouldn’t have a problem with the article.
There’s a certain irony to feeding a false statement to desperate people and profiting from it through books and seminar sales while being paid for writing this kind of bullshit.
That’s kind of a joke, right?
I’m sorry, but the “Laws of Attraction” don’t get a seat at the same dinner table with evolution, gravity, and relativity.
Do your homework, people. There’s only one way I can describe this kind of irresponsible writing.
Rule #3: The seller is not selling anything tangible other than their ability to sell.
This section is an expanded answer to my earlier question “why do we listen to salesmen and ignore scientists?”
When I hear a salesmen quote another salesman in their pitch to sell you their method of becoming whatever it is they’re selling, you know they don’t have anything of value to say.
I can respect writing coaches because they teach real writing skills that have helped me.
What I don’t respect are all the people who pose as writing coaches and give limited, contradictory advice: be authentic because what interests you will be interesting to your readers; write about the most popular subjects that made you money in the past; equating the personal brand they have created on social media with real value in their writing; writing for quantity; writing with quality; etc.
Not one successful “writer” talks about how they created their social media following.
That’s the only thing I want to know.
I guarantee you if I copied and pasted a hugely popular article from one of the social media superstars, it would be ignored by the vast majority of people for the simple reason that the writing is bland and the ideas are unoriginal.
And the reverse is true. If some mega-popular star on this site copied and pasted something I wrote about peak performance that had real sports science behind it, you can be sure it would get a gazillion reads, or whatever the latest arbitrary and confusing measure is our paywall du jour.
The piss-poor quality of thought in snake oil articles is generally so bad, I have to ask questions.
If Samsung paid people for false praise and negative comments about competitors, isn’t it possible that Ev Williams just pays people to write as shills for this content machine you and I power with our words?
How about productivity coaches who promise you to 10x, 100x, even 1000x your productivity?
From a mathematical standpoint, the only way you could achieve 1000x the results is if you started in a coma.
Every time I see an infomercial to “buy real estate with no money down,” I know it’s a scam.
Every time I see a TV preacher telling his congregation to send in money because God will give you everything you pray for, I hear a scam.
Every time I see an email or an online ad telling me how I can make big money by making viral videos, teaching workshops, or simply shopping online, it’s a scam.
Every example of an unoriginal, contradictory, non-specific skill qualifies as snake oil.
The bad news is your feed may be clogged with this bupkis* forever.
The good news is nothing is impossible!
The rest of the “Lord of the Rants” trilogy:
Volume I: a rap song parody, “Writin’ in a Shysta’s Paradise.”
Volume III: a history of scam artists, how to spot them, and how modern communication technology has increased their ability to do damage.
*Bupkis means nothing at all. I think that is a much better way to characterize the fluff that dominates this site. Besides, I couldn’t insult my friend Gutbloom, who has appropriated the word dreck (trash) for his highly entertaining and educational ramblings. To know if you are reading fine art dreck (as opposed to content marketer dreck), always look for the certified Dreck seal:
