“Scam ad” airing on CNBC?
Business Insider’s Lawrence Delevingne and John Carney write about the murky story regarding an advertiser airing ads on CNBC…
Yesterday, we noticed their ads on CNBC promising between $20,000 and $200,000 a month from real estate investments with “no upfront or investment cost.”
That sounded too good to be true.
A quick examination of the company’s website, address and contact phone only raised more questions, especially the lack of detail provided about how the business worked, which we noted in a post this morning.
We spoke with Vice President Rob Doucett today, but he declined to describe the nature of the business, referring us to another officer who deals with the press, Kate Arney (We haven’t yet heard back to our multiple requests for comment).
Advertisement
March 8, 2010 at 7:46 pm
I suppose a lot of things that are advertised on cable news channels are half scams… I read that Sham Wow works but that Slap thing Vince What’s-His Name sells is a waste of money. Is an ad on real estate investments during a time of depressed values all that different?
Is it the role of the cable network to thoroughly check out the claims of their advertisers?
March 8, 2010 at 7:56 pm
Don’t get me started on those Extenze ads. And Jimmy Johnson. I suppose this might be a tad worse, though.
March 8, 2010 at 8:24 pm
^ Extenze didn’t impress you, eh?
I’m hungry. I should run out for a Jimmy Johns sammich.
March 9, 2010 at 7:36 am
From our experience, ShamWow is more sham than wow.
If the real estate ad on CNBC is the same one we’ve seen on FNC, it’s almost certainly a scam. And one that will ruin the greedy sap trying to make quick easy money. The company is recruiting people with good credit scores so that they can use them as fronts for real estate speculation.
For a few years, this was being done with credit cards and was pretty much shut down. That scam involved people with good credit applying jointly or as a back-up (guarantor) for credit with someone who has bad or no credit, thereby raising the bad risk’s credit score and slightly lowering the good risk’s.