Sep 15 2009
FTC vs Kevin Trudeau
In my opinion, Kevin Trudeau is one of the most notorious snake-oil pushers of our generation. After spending time in prison for bad checks and credit card fraud, he would have us believe that he somehow hit upon “cures they don’t want you do know about.” Isn’t it interesting that convicted con-artists always seems to hit upon such well-guarded secrets. Dennis Lee claims to have found the secret of limitless energy, if only he were not attacked by Big Oil and a corrupt government. Kevin Trudeau claims to have found the cures for just about everything, but The Man is trying to shut him down.
What is even more amazing than the audacity of these claims is that a sufficient portion of the population is credulous enough to throw millions of dollars at the likes of Trudeau and Lee. Thankfully in most civilized nations it is a crime to lie to people in order to take their money. The problem has always been enforcement – authorities don’t have the resources to keep up with the constant whack-a-mole game against con artists. Sometimes they lack adequate authority to hand out punishments that would serve as a true deterrent.
However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has apparently had their sights on Kevin Trudeau and seem to finally be putting a dent in his snake oil empire. Trudeau became rich using infomercials to sell the public the “natural cures they don’t want you do know about,” and then follow up with the cure for debt and weight loss they don’t want you to know about. Wow – this guy is versatile, a medical and financial genius.
The FTC is taking him to task for misrepresenting his diet cure, which Trudeau has claimed is an “easy” method for weight loss. This “easy” method involves a 500 calorie per day diet (OK, you can stop there, but he adds), prescription hormone injections, and colonic for a month. It’s just that easy – no wonder the diet industry wants to keep this under wraps. If people knew they could lose weight just by eating 500 calories per day, why would they waste time and money on any other diet product.
Well, a Federal judge (aka The Man) decided that Trudeau violated the consent decree that the FTC had placed on Trudeau – essentially saying he cannot lie to the public to sell his wares. The Chicago Tribune reports:
At first, Gettleman imposed a $5.2 million fine. The FTC petitioned for a modest increase, and without a detailed explanation the judge jacked it up to $37.6 million, the regulator’s estimate of how much the book took in through infomercials.
In response Trudeau is pleading poverty. He actually has the temerity to claim that he made no money from the book, that it was all altruism and charity on his part. Just stunning.
At present the case is still in appeal, mainly over the 37.6 million dollar fine and three year ban from infomercials. I think the ban should be lifelong, and if Trudeau does not end up in the poor house the fine is too little.
But this is at least encouraging – it’s good to see someone like Trudeau on the ropes.
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13 Responses to “FTC vs Kevin Trudeau”
Trudeau’s infomercials always reminded me of a product called “Reliv” that my dad got into once.
The story behind Reliv, as told by the company, was that it was developed in the 50’s by a molecular biologist on a quest to end world hunger.
The product, they said, is different from traditional foods because it’s specifically formulated to “feed the body on a cellular level”, thereby allowing commonly malnourished cells to do thier jobs and fend off disease.
The ultimate claim was thus that all disease and disorder was in fact a by-product of cellular starvation.
The product sounded “sciencey” (sp) enough to fool my Dad into purchasing the product and then quit his job so that he could sell Reliv and help make the world a better place.
I heard the companies take when I went to a presentation they put together on my father’s behalf.
Of course, during this meeting they had a line of cheerful testimonials, all involving grandmothers that were finally able to stop taking meds for alzheimer’s, kids that were cured of ADHD, and individuals that were “cured” of cancer and could finally stop undergoing chemotherapy.
There was a dinner that followed the meeting and I jumped at the opportunity to question the “vice-president” of the company. He assured me that the product (and its many flavors) had undergone rigorous independant testing, but when I asked for the published findings he told me that they were not yet publically available.
When I asked how he could justify claiming that his product had the power to cure disease without offering supporting research he told me that Reliv was a “nutritional suppliment” and that the company “made no medical claims”… After, I just sat through an hour of Jesus-thanking testimonials, tearfully praising the company for saving grandma’s life.
When I brought my impressions to me father, and told him that the company was basically selling a powdered multivitamin, and attempted to explain that all food “feeds the body on the cellular level” he became emotional and asked me how I could argue with the testemonials. When I tried to explain the nature of placebo he defended the testomonials by saying that “those good people wouldn’t lie”.
I agree with you. All such organizations should be publically stripped of their credibility. As Richard Dawkins once said, one should be allowed to sue for damages on the basis that harm has been done to the public understanding of scientific truth.
Sometimes I wish I had as much charisma as Kevin Trudeau. Then again, sometimes that much charisma comes with an unhealthy dose of sociopathy.
Facts HE doesn’t want you to know about!
What is it about quacks and colonics? Why do so many quack treatments involve putting stuff up your ass?
Most likely it’s because the ass is generally seen as the most unclean part of the body and it’s easy to assonated that with the center of ill health. It’s also one of the easiest places to get fake results that look impressive from.
“It is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of contemptable nonsense is so freely propagated.” So said Rep Barney Frank to an ignorant woman in a recent town hall meeting when she likened President Obama to Adolf Hitler. I would apply the same terse comment to Kevin Trudeau. Trudeau gives new meaning to the term “bottom-dwelling scumsucker”. He not only has been successful in conning tens of millions of hard-earned dollars from unsuspecting, ignorant people, but he truly qualifies as a public health mennace, no less virulent or noxious than the very microbes we attempt to eradicate from our society. The feeling I get when I see Trudeau in action on one of his many infomercials, along with his paid scripted actors who sit across a table and stare at him doe-eyed as he gushes his con, is tantamount to having a bad case of gastritis. Why do I watch? It’s like driving by an accident on the highway…you know it’s bad and you shouldn’t look but you look anyway.
A couple of years ago I was in a bookstore in Idaho. Deseret Books is largely an online book seller in the western states but they also have a number of retail outlets. I noticed that there were some Trudeau titles on the shelves. When I returned home from my vacation I contacted the person in charge of purchasing for Deseret and told him all that I knew about the scamming Trudeau. I provided some good source material for him to check out, rather than just taking my word for it. Trudeau’s books are no longer being sold through Deseret. I can’t say for sure whether my comments supplied the impetus to dispense with Trudeau’s trash but I like to think so. At any rate, in my small way I was able to do something.
Hopefully one day we will see an end to this huckster.
Chet
“What is it about quacks and colonics? Why do so many quack treatments involve putting stuff up your ass?”
I guess they figure that everyone is as full of crap as they are.
Hurrah! the slimeball deserves to be jailed, if all we can do is take his money, I guess that’ll do. The thing is, there needs to be a “Corporate death penalty”. If you scam the public you should have to forfeit every penny you made and then some, in order to drive them out of business. how long has the penis-pills company been hawking their nonfunctional placebo ? four years? They too need culling.
These scam artists concentrate on colonics because that is from that area where there ideas are pulled.
-The thing is, there needs to be a “Corporate death penalty”. If you scam the public you should have to forfeit every penny you made and then some, in order to drive them out of business.-
You rip every penny from his dirty little hands and then make sure he rots in jail for the rest of his life. You then make sure that this punishment is well covered in the media.
This runaround with the ftc is just pathetic. It really just highlights how unprotected you are by the people who are supposed to be helping.
Not to defend Trudeau, but I see we are being scammed by our own government on an even larger scale. Does anyone think that the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac deserved their multimillion dollar bonuses. Jobs and positions on boards that they received after so called “service” in the Clinton administration. I don’t see anyone demanding that they rot in prison and have their earnings confiscated. Yes, he should be punished, but there are a hell of a lot of others that deserve it too.
Could it be that ‘we’ don’t want people to know about his cures because they’re stupid and occasionally dangerous? Narcissism apparently is the secret to his success
OK, I’m late coming to this, and nervous at, once again, taking the capitalists side in a debate that was primarily about science but…
Equating the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with Trudeau is utterly ridiculous. These people were running institutions which were set up to allow normal hard-working families to get access to mortgages which the market was otherwise failing to provide. The intention at inception, and according to all the evidence, since, was to provide mortgages at a fair price to people who could afford them.
There have been some egregious failures of controls in the mortgage market, but the aim of the institutions was not a priori to screw people over, and equating the CEOs with a scam artist is crazy.