I'd feel worse about making a big deal about these crooked schemes if there weren't such a cross-pollenation between the most dishonest bamboozles and the sales pitches that fall like rain in every part of the world where mass media and commerce tryst. After all, the $45 healing crystal amulet in the new age catalog, the fresh frozen food in the supermarket, the New & Improved Republicrat candidates, the annual going-out-of-business sales, the evening news and the advertisements disguised as money all use a common language of bogus claims and deceptive advertising that they share with more amusing and blatant scams.
Capitalism, with its perpetual shell-game of paper money, plastic credit and the like, has been susceptible to Con Artists from the beginning. Check out such extraordinary popular delusions as The South Sea Bubble and Holland's 17th Century Tulip Mania. Charles Ponzi's famous scheme has been repeated in various forms ever since, the chaos they leave in their wake threatening recently to topple protocapitalist states emerging from communist Europe. Ivar Kreuger built a marvelous bubble out of a match company early in this century, but it collapsed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash.
Pyramid Schemes (like the endemic "Make Money Fast") -- Ponzi on a Xerox budget -- are only a percentage of the many scams to proliferate on-line. My favorite so far: the Sexygirls Scam, in which a 'free' program for viewing naughty pictures secretly used users modems to call pricy toll-numbers in Moldova.
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P.T. Barnum |
P.T. Barnum's many scams were more whimsical and entertaining than cynical and dishonest, not to say that he didn't pocket the cash at day's end with a smile on his face.
Snake-oil salesmen have been a colorful part of the American landscape since the beginning. Check out the weight-reduction eyeglasses and the foot-pumped breast enlarger at The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.
The town of Palisade, Nevada nurtured a tourist-attracting reputation as the toughest town in the West for years by staging realistic gunfights for out-of-towners. And a crash-landing flying saucer turned out to be just the thing to boost the economy of Roswell, New Mexico.
You'll find more information on scams and frauds in our Impostors, Art Forgery, and Great God Hoax pages.