The Internet Can Bite You

Beware the magic pill and the secret cure that doctors hate.

Extracted from
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-the-internet/355726/

Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet

…............His company Just Think Media may have been the most successful Internet venture no one had ever heard of: in 2009, with just 20 employees, it earned more than $100 million in revenue. Few entrepreneurs, past or present, have ever built such a lucrative company so young................. Willms knew that he was the subject of an exhaustive investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. And what this investigation would determine, essentially, was whether Willms, the white-hot e-commerce whiz, was actually one of the most egregious scammers in the history of the Internet. …............between 2007 and 2011, the lawsuit claimed, Willms defrauded consumers of some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print. In just a few months, Willms’s companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit cards and opened new ones …............

If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past six years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)

Submitted by Paul Hunter