Note: I am not promoting this website, I am reviewing it. Here is an example of a very optimistic sales pitch on Craigslist:
Are you tired of the Daily Commute?
Are you tired of the Corporate “Rat Race”?
Are you tired of making everyone else Rich?
Finally, take control of your life and start living
the way you and your family deserve. This is a
legititmate $250,000 first year opportunity. Please
visit my website for all the life changing details:
www.endingthecommute.com
The website includes a loud annoying audio sales pitch and a picture of the Internet Millionaire’s old rusty car beside a picture of him in a nice suit leaning against his new luxury car. I have to wonder if either of these cars are actually his. The old car photo looks like a typical Auto Trader photo.
He misspelled the word legitimate in his ad. It would have never appeared in my feeds if he had spelled it correctly because I filter out legitimate jobs. Seriously, I administer a site that pulls thousands of postings a day for me to review and every single one that ever uses that word is a scam.
First off, for the sake of search engines… X2O is a SCAM
This product is touted as a breakthrough discovery in natural science, but it is really just a means to an end for an MLM scheme. Multilevel marketing has to have a product in order to be legal in the USA and many other countries. Selling little bags of electrolytes to people who are desperate to lose weight fits the bill. I tried to find out exactly what was in the product, but the site is more about enlisting salespeople. They even sell amphetamines so they can have wired salespeople.
I have a life sciences degree and I can concur with the hype to the extent that drinking an adequate supply of water is important to good health.
Here is a silly testimonial that is meant to be taken seriously…
Testimonial:
I have been drinking 40-50 oz. of soda every night working the over night shift for the last 9 years. There are no words to explain how I feel after using X20. This product has been a blessing for me and my family. I feel alert, healthy and have more energy to work. As an added bonus…I LOST WEIGHT TOO! THAT IS GREAT! Thank you Xooma for this X20 product.
Hmm… So a Floridian stops drinking 40-50 ounces of soda and replaces it with water. That reduces daily caloric intake by over 500 calories, yet the happy customer credits the packets of proprietary electrolytes with the improved health and weight loss. Do you think that customer might also be selling the stuff?
EDIT: As an added bonus, this Weight Loss Water miracle comes complete with a Lexan bottle, which is quite possibly carcinogenic.
The information in my title is a statistic taken from AmeriPlan’s® own disclosure page. They use ‘text as image’ for anything discouraging that they are obligated to disclose. This means that they meet their obligation without having to worry about the facts showing up in any kind of diligent search by someone who is considering working with AmeriPlan® .
I was not considering Ameriplan® , I was weeding through work at home scams and I had to look very closely at their business model in order to figure it out. It was hard, because the company and its IBO’s do everything they can to obscure two things. First, the product being sold is designed to look like a viable alternative to medical insurance but it is not. Second, the whole thing is an MLM.
If you are not risk averse and if you don’t have a problem selling people on something that may not be of much use to them, you might want to consider AmeriPlan® . You will, of course have to convince several other people that it is a good idea in order to ever see any money for your efforts.
Yesterday I posted a movie and some commentary on the ethics of manipulating photos. Now there is a viral video from diet.com talking about the same thing, but with a diet and body image slant.
I haven’t actually listened to the whole thing, as I am supposed to be working. Some of the tricks remind me of some things that I saw on the ‘Watch Us Lose’ table on the front page of Kimkins over the last year or so. Of course some of Heidi’s pictures needed nothing more complicated than a slight vertical stretch to help recreate past weight loss success.
The image above has been transformed for the purposes of satire (I put the text version of air quotes in all by myself).
Scientology is paying for advertisement on YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google. Google has been criticized in the past for its cooperation with China. Tom Cruise pumped money into China while making Mission Impossible III. Supposedly scientology is committed to making human rights a reality around the World. That must be why their most famous member injected $10 million into a totalitarian country that is the most famous human rights abuser.
Consumer Affairs journalist David Wood wrote an very good article about Kimkins and it hit the net early today. He was pretty critical of Woman’s World, so much so that I want to go back and see if they really wrote some of the stuff that he is quoting. A lot of the hype sounds almost insane in retrospect.
The only new news for people who have been following along are some frank quotes from lawyer John Tiedt.
I am glad to see the story retold on a website with the reach and traffic of a site like ConsumerAffairs.com.
The seven figure sales at Kimkins.com were due in no small part to the favorable coverage in Woman’s World Magazine. This publication has huge circulation, and the print versions will often sit in waiting rooms and salons enjoying months or years of repeated perusal. People seeking to expose the Kimkins fraud did not get very far in trying to convince Woman’s World to make any kind of reversal or apology. We personally received no answers to our questions last year and instead got a cease and desist order. In response to the letter, I made changes to the cover image that I was using to make it arguably transformative. There was no follow up from the magazine. I didn’t send any further correspondence to them. Many, many interested people did.
After a long wait, the magazine has finally apologized in detail, on their website. A print apology is also forthcoming. I thank them for it.
There are several third parties who are standing up and condemning the actions taken by Anonymous against scientology. Many of them point to the fact that they are giving scientologists the perfect opportunity to claim that they are experiencing religious persecution. I agree with this argument, and I would like to point out that many countries do not recognize scientology’s claim to be a religion, choosing instead to view scientology as a business enterprise.
In some respects, scientology is very much a multi-level marketing scheme. I was hesitant in writing that because I don’t want to give MLMs a bad name.
This mulleted mannequin and these fiberglass dinosaurs live together in a museum display in Kentucky. Creationists built the museum to illustrate their interpretation of the natural history of the Earth. All 6,000 to 10,000 years of it.
There is an overwhelming consensus among REAL scientists that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. I personally think that the inception and construction of this museum was a way for some people to scam other people out of some money. I don’t have any hard evidence, I just BELIEVE it.
One of the most contentious issues in American politics is military spending.
Around twenty years ago, General Electric was the first and possibly the biggest corporation to face fines and lawsuits stemming from a crackdown on fraud related to contracts with the Pentagon. Maybe it’s time for another crackdown. It could provide a needed boost of revenue for the military.
A little over ten years ago, GE was caught cheating the Military by not adequately testing aircraft components. A GE engineer approached the FBI after the concerns that he expressed within the company failed to result in changes that he felt were necessary. The approximately $7 million awarded in a subsequent lawsuit mostly went to the government, with some going to the whistle-blower and his lawyers as well.
If this is a pattern, it would seem that a payment is overdue. There were also some criminal convictions against GE in 1990 and 1992.
This year, they sold their plastics division to the Saudis.
