1st Tarred and Feathered Write-Off
Oct 03 '08
The Bottom Line Swindlers, quacks, hucksters, and purveyors of the impossible are generous; the laughs come at their expense! Let's expose a few modern cons in the catalog.
The emergence of commerce prompted or enabled the development of much of human technology. Since time immemorial, one of the most productive areas of development has been the creation of methods and devices to remove money from a willing participant's wallet without trading anything of worth in return. Call them scams, swindles, cons, snake oil, or whatever else, they're not going to go away, and skilled grifters can run them and stay out of trouble with the law.
The World Wide Web puts articles on even the most esoteric of topics, like Hadacol or Soapy Smith, a mouse-click away from readers who may never have heard of either. You'd think that swindlers would have to find honest work in such a world, but it's instead given them a broader audience.
I'm not going to call their marks innocent victims--the usual swindler plays off of the mark's greed, vanity, envy, or spite--but I'll say that con artists bring out the worst in people, then take them for a ride. Let's strike back a bit, and have some fun, too.
The Epinions catalog contains dozens if not hundreds of money-removing devices, legal modern-day scams ranging from tax books full of advice that will land people in prison, to exercise and diet products that promise the metabolically impossible, to sugar pills to cure all ills, to common fruits and berries--think wolfberries or mangosteen--being sold as panaceas. Let's tar them, feather them, and run them out on a rail! (Metaphorically, of course)
The write-off rules are simple:
(1) Write about products and services that are grossly misrepresented, unsafe, or make impossible claims. The more outlandish, the better.
(2) Remember: there's a major difference between dishonest and merely lousy.
(3) You need not purchase a swindler's goods to review them, but it can be more difficult to write a good review if you haven't. If you're not basing your review on having personally tried the product or service, research it thoroughly.
(4) Keep it light and punchy. Try to make the reader laugh a bit. Con artists don't deserve to be taken seriously. Have fun.
(5) Put a note about the write-off and a link to this announcement at the very end of your reviews. Don't mention a write-off in the title.
(6) Send me an e-mail or leave a comment here, and I'll put a link to your review at the bottom of this announcement.
Let the laughs begin! If you're having trouble getting started, look for "Apis mellifica" in the catalog, then look up what it is.
Tarred and Feathered to date:
Oscillococcinum sugar pills, by bkalafut
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Epinions.com ID:
bkalafut
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 in Restaurants & Gourmet |
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Member: Bennett Kalafut
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Reviews written: 257
Trusted by: 42 members
About Me:
Stretching single molecules for fun and profit.
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