All this money comes from tricking vulnerable people. I searched for information and nobody is talking about it, except for a very few minor bloggers. Perhaps one or two per year. And most of those just laugh and move on. That is why I conclude that nobody cares about lies.
OK, accusing someone of lying is serious business, so here is the proof.
The headline and pictures: lies.
Look at that middle ad: "55 year old Mum looks 25." How can that possibly be true? Look at how wrinkled the woman on the left is! Look at how young and smooth the woman on the right is! Have they discovered time travel? It has to be a lie. And just to prove it, they lie in every other possible way, just to make it clear that they are liars. So nobody should be in any doubt.
The locations: lies.
It says "local Mom." I get these where I live, with a "local" town name added. I live in a very remote village. No way are any of these women local. The same pictures and wording are used throughout the world, and sometimes local town names are added automatically. The local Mom did not expose the miracle. She either does not exist, or is a victim of this scam.
The business model: lies
The ad says the trick costs $5. You may ask how a company can afford to flood the Internet with highly expensive ads if the product (a) plainly cannot work as advertised, and (b) only costs $5? Delivery alone would cost almost that. It makes no sense. But change it to $80 a month (see below) and suddenly the numbers add up.
Their identity: lies.
I Googled "wrinkle cream scam" and these sponsored ads are at the top. Notice the URL addresses: Daily Mail and BBC. Other ads say the independent (a respected UK newspaper).
So I clicked the links, and guess what? Lies. They lead to fake pages that have nothing to do with the Daily Mail, BBC, Independent, or anyone who has any credibility of any kind. And you cannot leave the pages without clicking on their popup (that disables the normal 'X'). There is no way I am clicking on any of their pop-ups, so had to force the browser to close using Task manager.
Their history: lies
The phrase "Mom discovers secret" and the whole look and feel is very familiar: almost the exact same methods were used a few months ago with teeth whitening. As this Youtube video reminds us, this is a scam. That is, it obtains money by deception.
It claims that the product is either free or costs very little (typically free, or £4), then asks for credit card details and takes a large amount (typically over £80 at a time). That is how they afford all the expensive ads.
You can find this kind of post in many places, but you have to look hard it's drowned out by the money from the scammers.
They (or someone very similar) were taken to court in 2009 for this kind of practice, but still it continues, with the blessing of almost every web site on the Net it seems.
"Advanced Wellness Research, Inc., a company allegedly offering free trials for its products, including Acai berry supplements and whitening toothpaste, faces a lawsuit in Florida. That state’s attorney general filed the action, claiming the company failed to mention that customers would be charged approximately $80 on a monthly basis for products they did not intend to purchase...
"In August, Advanced Wellness Research was one of 40 companies sued by talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who charged the companies were using her name and likeness to promote their acai berry supplements."Two years later, nothing has changed
Further searching reveals that they are still doing the exact same thing. Same wording, same products, same promises, same false use of credible names. These links are from just a few weeks ago. Year after year they do it, and it barely gets a mention. It is hardly surprising, as so many sites profit from their ads.
The disturbing part to me is that the victims blame themselves for being stupid. Like it's OK to lie, and the victim's fault for being deceived.
Their Google presence: lies
They benefit from another kind of liar: the one that claims to be top sites and to have useful information. But instead they offer no useful information at all. When I searched for the phrase "dermatologists hate her" I got all kinds of link farm type sites pretending to be objective. For example, these totally fake "blogs" (the addresses are "eklablog" and blog4ever" at two different addresses.
Notice anything?
- They are the same site repackaged with two different addresses. I don't know the secrets of Google's search algorithm but I think it's safe to say that it supposed to avoid multiple copies of the same site. Someone is working hard to deceive the search engine.
- It contains no useful content. All the links are bad, but I have moved the worst one to the top. It shows a happy family and offers a shopping comparison site for "Dermatologists Hate Local Mom." Is there even the slightest possibility that the link will take us to a shopping comparison site where we can compare the price of something called "Dermatologists Hate Local Mom"?
- It flat out lies. "Top site." A top site is the one that offers no useful content? Really? That was not even top of the list (I moved it there to save space, the others were spam type sites). IT is not top in any sense.
- It implies that this is a search site, to help you. "It's your search! Find what you need in seconds!" Yet the site has no useful content, other than links to other deceptive sites. At worst it obtains money by deception, at best it just makes searching harder by crowding out useful links.
EDIT, Feb 1st 2012: I just got caught by one of their evil spam popups. Despite using a popup blocker and two warnign systems. When I tried to close their page it refused, and popped up another lie: that the "trial promotion" ends tomorrow.
"Don't blame us"?
But web site owners have no control over what ads get served, right? Well I am sure that is what they believe. It is very convenient and profitable to believe that. Who bothers to check?
A few months ago I considered running ads on my site, but they would be personally vetted to blatant scams don't get through. I made a mock up page, then did some research and found that I don't have to bother. Apparently all the major ad providers already offer filters. I don't know how good the filters are, but surely at least one ad provider offers a white list or a key word system? "Local Mom" and "one weird tip" type ads have been running for years. They are not hard to spot.
It is hard to blame the liars if we could say no, but instead turn a blind eye and take their money (laundered through the ad networks) year after year.
Summary
Get rich quick, miracle diets, teeth whitening, anti wrinkle, and so on have been going for years. The same look, the same tactics, the same results, the same victims (usually the poor or uneducated). The big ad companies, the web sites that rely on ads, all know about them. They all gain money from the deception. And nobody cares. Nobody even talks about it. A few high profile articles would shame Google and Tribalfusion (the people who served the first example ad), but nobody will write those articles because the web sites they write on make money from these ads.
It is sometimes worth being reminded that although we pretend to care about truth, really we don't unless it immediately benefits us. Any attempt to fix the world has to start from accepting that fact. It is why my approach is purely economic. I have to demonstrate that building an economy on lies is against our own long term interests. You might think that is obvious, but apparently not.
Postscript:
Who is behind these weird tricks? Why do they see nothing wrong in lying?
(Speaking metaphorically of course.)
Images from worldofwallpapers.com, the BBC, and a billion web sites.
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