Watch out for Infomercials

by Anonymous

For some reason, endless scam artists can continue to afford to pay for endless infomercial cable television air time for their “too good to be true” training materials or low-cost business-in-a-box.

They begin their presentation with a small element of truth, (like “investing in real estate can be profitable” (for the savvy investor) or “there is money to be made on the Internet”). They then offer a low cost introductory training program or everything-you-need startup materials.

The infomercials appeal to out-of-work, deep-in-debt, retired, or highly-suggestible people who lack Critical Thinking Skills (the ability to seek, evaluate, differentiate and assimilate new knowledge).

For a “too good to be true” scam to be effective, it must contain at least an element of the truth. Consider this, a small number of well-informed investors do make significant profits by buying property, tax lien certificates, etc. from distressed home owners, but it takes a lot of time-consuming research and more than a hundred dollar training course to learn how to do it consistently without wasting time and making expensive mistakes.

Sure there are some people who make money selling products on the Internet, but the successful percentage is extremely low.

The low-cost cable TV infomercial home study training courses and business-in-a-box products are often merely color glossy bait to get you to pay a few dollars to swallow a much larger fishhook, and to put you (and your credit card information) on their “gullible subscriber” marketing list, which they may exploit for many other purposes in the future.

Many of the big name promoters of these scam plans have a long chain of failures, bankruptcies, regulatory agency fines, and fraud convictions in a variety of diverse market places, while their infomercials mislead many by claiming that the product developer is a leading expert in their field.

The same slick “industry experts” keep getting caught, going bankrupt, and then popping up later in a very different industry (like out of real estate, into popular food supplements, etc).

It is now surprisingly easy to learn about most of the large-scale repeat offenders. You can go to any web search engine (like google.com), enter the infomercial presenter’s name and the word “scam” (or something similar like “complaints”, “rip off”, etc.).

There is a good chance that if an infomercial really is too good to be true, many people will have placed their complaints and documentation about the scam artist on the web for you to see.