Crimes of Persuasion : Innocently Enabling Fraud?
Les Henderson wrote a book, Crimes of Persuasion, and maintains a website which chronicles some of the variety of distributorship fraud works see, Fraudulent Display Rack Business Opportunity Fraud and Vending Machine Scam Offers.
I purchased the book, which is worth reading simply for the variety of scams. But the website demonstrates the difficulties and trade-offs that private consumer scam sites have. Generally, while these private sites are better than their public counterparts, partly because of their sincere dedication, the use of adsense on the site innocently confers its reputation on the ads running on the site. Scammers take advantage of this.
Many individuals who I represent first saw the business opportunity ad in a national newspaper and assumed that there would be some minimal checking done by the newspaper. This is false and I am not aware of any newspaper in the US or Canada that has even been sued for misleading advertising, even though some of the ads placed in the newspaper were absurd on their face.
Recently, one of the consumer forums, www.scam.com, ran into this problem -albeit in an unusual manner. A disgruntled individual complained about the site to Google and got their adsense adverts pulled. Upon being reinstated, the ads, at least for awhile, seemed not to represent scam opportunities. But until Google gives more control over their adsense program to consumer sites, the popular and therefore wealthy sites are simply increasing their liabilities with their popularity.
