I’ve never been much for celebrity, I’ve not put up posters of movie stars and whatnot, with the exception of a couple of posters my uncle gave me 45 years ago. I just regard the whole thing as suspicious – why do they want to be celebrities, anyways? I can understand the drive for excellence, of course, and the importance of society pointing at the excellent as role models. But when they strut about, chase the cameras, and etc, it just gets to be too much.
Better to glorify Stephen Hawking.
But this article on the use of celebrity culture to deprive the baby boomers of their wealth justifies my admittedly suspicious ways. Take it away, Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed.news (itself an uncomfortable link to celebrity):
Since 2015, Ads Inc. has made money — lots of it — by executing one of the internet’s most persistent, lucrative, and sophisticated scams: the subscription trap. The subscription trap works by tricking people into buying what they think is a single free trial of a celebrity-endorsed product. Although the customers would receive the product — which in most cases was not made by Ads Inc. itself — in reality, the celebrity has nothing to do with the offer. And in purchasing the free trial, the customer unwittingly commits to a pricey monthly subscription designed to be hard to cancel.
Yep, it’s a classic. And I have to say, the last 70 years has been a concerted, if uncoordinated, plan to train those legions of consumers into buying eagerly into celebrity culture.
“This is clearly a massive worldwide problem,” said Steve Baker, who spent two decades investigating scams at the FTC and now runs the Baker Fraud Report, a website that reports on consumer fraud. Last December, he published a detailed report on subscription traps for the Better Business Bureau, which found that most people are charged roughly $100 by the time they’ve figured out what had happened.
“There are millions of victims of this, certainly,” he told BuzzFeed News.
The Ads Inc. employee said its victims often have one thing in common: age.
“There is one demo that this workflow is targeted towards, and that’s baby boomers,” they said. “You run this toward anyone else, and it’s a disaster. But you do this fake news shit with a trial offer scam and you send it to somebody that’s not that savvy [and it works].”
So if you’re not a boomer, maybe you’re not infected with that celebrity meme. The thing is, it’s such a silly scam, you have to wonder if the victims’ minds are even turning over anymore:
You don’t know Ads Inc., but you may have seen one of its ads on Facebook: a tabloid-style image that claims a celebrity has been caught saying or doing something scandalous that puts their career or life in jeopardy. The ad leads to a webpage that mimics a media brand such as TMZ, Fox News, or People magazine. But it’s all fake: the “news” article, the website, and the additional claim that this star has, for example, discovered an amazing new skin cream that you can try for a small fee. The fake celebrity scandal hinted at in the ad is the hook that gets people to click so they can be pitched on what appears to be a no-risk, free product trial for a small price, such as $4.99.
And it never occurred to the victims to wonder how their favorite C&W singer or football player discovered this new product or principle or whatever?
It’s just dumb.
Here’s the real hitch in this Old West town:
Prior to these revelations, Ads Inc.’s public image has been that of a digital marketing firm led by a charismatic twentysomething with tight connections in San Diego GOP politics. “Ads Inc. is a rebel alliance of hustlers and doers on a mission to disrupt the lifestyle industry with our advanced approach to product creation and marketing,” states the company’s LinkedIn page, which boasts that it’s “one of the fastest-growing advertising agencies in California.”
Burke presented himself as the archetype of a successful, young tech industry CEO. His social media posts showed him and his statuesque girlfriend boarding helicopters, private planes, and first-class cabins to party in Las Vegas, tour Japan, and safari in Africa, where Burke would eventually invest in Ol Malo, a ranch, game sanctuary, and lodge in Kenya, hoping to turn it into an “entrepreneur playground.”
Another Republican. It’s disappointing. But unsurprising. After all, who rode the lying dreams train into the White House on the backs of the boomers? That’s right.
Just another data point indicating boomers are easily taken in.
