Asinine Advertisements during C2C

So I listen to a lot of Coast to Coast AM in the middle of the night, which in my area is broadcast on "Hot Talk 560 KSFO." As is the case with all of their programming, the show seems to be supported by an awful lot of BS commercials for things that sound downright fraudulent.

One interesting commonality I've noticed in several ads from different companies purporting to offer debt counseling and relief or help with tax problems is that they specifically solicit business from listeners whose liabilities are at least ten thousand dollars, promising information about "secret programs" or laws which will allow them to legally negotiate with the IRS or credit card companies and settle their debts for much less than they owe.

Naturally, this is just disingenuous wording on the part of the advertisers. Of course it's legal for you to enter into negotiations with any entity to which you owe money! That doesn't mean they have to accept your proposed terms, but I hardly think this is a secret which creditors and the IRS want to prevent anybody from learning.

If asked to choose between selling a debt to a collection agency at a huge loss or getting a cardholder to agree to a payment plan and thus have a greater likelihood of recovering a larger amount of money, what bank wouldn't choose the latter?

The ads, of course, imply --without specifically saying so-- that if one does business with the advertiser, the banks or IRS can somehow be forced against their will --thanks to these "secret programs"-- to dismiss debt without one having to declare bankruptcy.

Which is complete hogwash.

My question is this: Why do all these ads always, always, mention that magical $10,000 figure? Presumably there's a reason they can make more money off a sucker whose debt is larger, perhaps by basing their fees on a percentage of what is owed?

I can't imagine any actual law stipulating that if you've squandered $10,000 you don't have, you will somehow enjoy special protections or recourse not available to your neighbor who's only spent $9,999 of somebody else's money. Such regulations would tend to encourage financially challenged people to incur even more debt than they would have otherwise taken upon themselves.

The stupidity of the ads on KSFO ("Hot Talk" 560AM) fascinates and sickens me*. This is especially true because they play the same damned ads over and over again, day in and day out.

Here's one especially peculiar example. The commercials for these bozos right here...

www.bostonmedicalgroup.com...


...promise that in most cases, they'll show you immediate results right there in the doctor's office.



Their business is helping men with premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction.



So...

Are they telling guys that they'll be sportin' full wood right there in the doctor's office? That they'll be sportin' wood for a good, long while, long enough to satisfy a woman prior to passing the point of no return?




Unless they've got some very sexy nurses who take a real "hands-on" approach, I'm gonna say I'd just as soon wait 'til I get home to experience those immediate results.

Another ad they run all the time is for some snake-oil called "Ever-Cleanse," which promises to shrink your waist and remove those "pounds you can't get rid of through diet or exercise" by flushing from your colon the "impacted" human waste which "some experts say" is lining the walls of your colon "like spackle or paste."

Like spackle or paste.

Good Lord!

"Some experts say?"

Translation:

"We can cite no credible research to substantiate our claims."

Oh, the dumbness and sleaze of it all! I guess it's hard to be dignified when you know the product you're pushing has no intrinsic value.















*As opposed to the bulk of the station's programming, which angers and sickens me.

It's amazing how many of the ads on that station play on dumb people's fears about the Internet and/or identity theft. They're running a new one that starts out with the sound of somebody typing on a keyboard, then you hear a really obnoxious, female voice practically yelling, "Why are you letting that search engine spy on you!? Don't you know everything you enter goes into a database that can be accessed by marketers or the government!?"

I'm paraphrasing, but that's the general tone as she advises her clueless male friend to use the no-name search site they're hawking instead of Google.

Then there are the commercials for "Life-lock" and a other equally worthless services that want to charge feeble-minded old people hundreds of dollars per year in exchange for the illusion that their identity can't be stolen and their precious little credit ratings can't be harmed.

And don't even get me started on the ones that play on the fear of actual harm, like, to your body, in the form of violent crime (home security alarm/monitoring services) or car crashes (General Motors On-Star), for example.

Then there's the fear of financial ruin and/or the collapse of civilization, for which we've got various gold investment schemes (why risk your money in mutual funds where you might earn a little over the years, when you can be a gold-bug and earn about as much as you would from a savings account at Well Fargo?) and Alex Jones attempting to destroy his hard-won credibility by pimping seeds of all things. "Remember," he says, "in a real crisis, non-hybrid seeds are the ultimate barter item!"

Funny, I always thought guns and bullets would trump seeds and gold in the post-apocalypse wastelands.

I really burn up when I hear this one local-to-the-SF-Bay-Area a**hole, Brian Susman, urging nervous seniors to get involved in some dodgy reverse-mortgage scheme, all the while claiming it's not a reverse-mortgage scheme.

I hate Brain Susman 'cause he belongs to this new breed of media-savvy, covert bigot who've learned to obfuscate their racial and cultural elitism with just enough homeland-security rhetoric that their like-minded listeners can maintain the comfortable illusion that they aren't listening to, and enjoying, racist radio.

But I seem to have gotten way off on a tangent there. And I haven't even touched on Susman's sexism and homophobia. Don't get me started.

reply to post by flightsuit


How about the new one with Alex Jones selling his doomsday seed kits that "could be" more valuable than gold or silver!

Or the amazing AM radio antenna...

Or the "some experts say" that gold is primed to go up to record levels, call for our free gold investors kit.

Yes, I agree that most of their ad's are scams that take advantage of their listeners.

reply to post by flightsuit


I think you assume to much. First of all for creditors, you must understand that their game is the following. Buy bad debt from whoever issued it at a fraction of the price. I owe a company 1000$, they can't get it from me, so they sell it to the creditor for lets say 200$.

So now that creditor comes to me and says, hey man you owe $1000! Then through intimidation and threats, most often they get money out of the people they harass. Often more than what they paid for the debt. Lot's of people have had documented success asking for a reduction from creditors who for instance in the aforementioned example, paid 1/5th of the value of the debt, would likely with some persuasion even be willing to slice off 1/5th for you, if of course you promised to pay promptly.

But, on that note, I will tell you right now that Creditors can be beaten. It is law that for you to be liable, the creditor must send you a proper bill with a ink signature from someone at the company who is willing to be a party to the debt. As well as the original contract, signed by both you and a member of the original creditors company, which created the debt. The company will never provide this, and since they will not produce a bill, cannot actually take further action against you.

Also, the other ads you mention about the IRS (or CRA/canada) are lawyers that are accountants as well, they perpetuate the lie that it is against the law to not file, but it is NOT against the law to owe taxes. What their shpeel is, is that they "help you negotiate a fair settlement, with an appropriate timeline to repay".

My mother used those services as she hadn't filed her taxes for 14 years. Which I'll note, she was NEVER ONCE bothered for not paying her taxes. She only decided to start paying cause she had opened a franchise, the lawyer/accountant cost over $10,000 alone, and between her and my step father, have had to pay over $100,000 to the CRA over the last year. Crippling all finances. Whether this was a fair settlement, I don't know. But I think it would have been better to save all that money, and never enter into contract at all with CRA/IRS by AGREEING that you OWE THE BANKERS by filing your taxes.

You waive all your rights by submitting you taxes, and on top of that, you agree with them that there is an imaginary debt, and that you should be liable for that. You do this in 'exchange' for services, such as the service of having every dollar in your society produced with debt on top of it, creating an impossible, unbeatable cycle of debt.

If you do not ever create contract/joiner with the IRS, you will not have to pay taxes. That truly is the bottom line, take it or leave it.


How you know if you are bound by law (STATUTES) to pay taxes:
- If you used your SSN/SIN when you got your job, you are now paying into a pension fund, and as a result only employees pay into a pension, thus your SSN makes you an employee of the state. Since you are an employee of the state, they are entitled to a portion of your wages.
- If you declared the amount of money you made and filed your taxes.

How you know if you are not bound by statutes to pay taxes:
- you have done NONE of the above.

GG WP

[edit on 5-4-2009 by king9072]

[edit on 5-4-2009 by king9072]

Yeah, there's even a new one that I just heard for the first time tonight, from a competing purveyor of doomsday seed supplies. Their name is Survivalist Seed-Bank or something, and the ad is really weird. It's kind of like an industrial noise-music/dadaist sound collage that makes absolutely no attempt to obfuscate the fact that the advertiser is trying to scare you into buying their product.

Their message, quite literally, is that our civilization is collapsing (the word "meltdown" is used), and you'd better buy these seeds right now, 'cause we have run out of time.

Sickening, really.

Originally posted by king9072
reply to post by flightsuit

 

I think you assume to much.

I'm not sure what it is you think I'm assuming, or what I said that you disagree with.

Another really annoying ad they keep running is the one which claims that some wiz-kid from a "billionaire family" just spent three years and twenty million dollars researching "the best home-based business opportunities," and that when he found the best one, "he bought it."

The pitch-man in this ad sounds awfully slimey, and when he gets to the part of his schpeel where he says, "he bought it," I swear you can tell by the change in his tone of voice that he's lying and he knows it and it's making him feel insecure.

If you've heard the ad, you know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, the guy urges you to go to goherenext.com, which redirects you to a site which promises to divulge the identity of the mysterious billionaire and the name of this wonderful company he supposedly bought, but demands your full name, a valid e-mail address, and a valid telephone number.

Go ahead and enter a made-up e-mail address and phone number, as there's no e-mail validation step required before you're then redirected to one of the lamest sales-recruitment videos you'll ever see:

Instead of a real pitch-man, your host is a Flash-animated cartoon character (I think his voice is the same guy from the radio ad) who reveals that (big surprise) the so-called "home-based business opportunity" is a multi-level-marketing pyramid scheme, ostensibly selling nutritional supplements and cleaning products.

The company in question is not Harbalife, Equinox or Amway, but something called "Shaklee," though it wouldn't surprise me if Shaklee was actually a front for one of those better-known, (i.e., already notorious and reviled) pyramid schemes.

The best part of the Flash-cartoon guy's sales pitch is when he claims that Warren Buffett and Donald Trump are "involved in network marketing."

No wonder Trump kept pestering me to try his super blue-green algae pills and water-filters!

The mystery business genius, meanwhile, is Shaklee CEO Roger Barnett, who I'm assuming, is not the same Roger Barnett that was recently sued by the illegal immigrants he'd rounded up at gun-point on his ranch.

Hmmm...

If either Roger Barnett did a vanity search and saw the other one's info come up on Google, I wonder which Roger Barnett would be more horrified?

Its pretty sad, you'd think a show like C2C would pull in more reputable advertising than these snake oil salesmen, I certainly would never ever buy anything from these but I guess there's a lot of gullible people who would and maybe thats EXACTLY the market they're going for, people who are willing to believe in some of the C2C topics might be more susceptible. I listen to C2C since 96
but still smart enough to know these are B.S.!

I listen online and just mute the sound during the commercials, end of problem!

[edit on 14-4-2009 by atsbeliever]

"Snake oil" is right!

I wonder how many of these ads are "packaged" with C2C wherever it's heard, as opposed to being specific to the SF Bay Area, which is where I listen. The ones where the ad is read by George Noory or Alex Jones, obviously, would be national, while the ones read by 560AM KSFO personalities, of course, would be just for the Northern California market.

As for the likelihood that the advertisers are targeting C2C listeners 'cause they think we're gullible, well, some of the ads seem very much tailored to C2C type subject matter, but many of the others also run on KSFO during the day, when their format is "conservative" talk radio.

Such a pity what's become of KSFO. During my childhood, they broadcast nothing but classic, "oldies" radio programs in the evening, and my father an I loved listening to them.

Back in the 1990's, they became a right-wing talk radio station, but they featured almost all local talent, radio hosts who weren't afraid to skewer corrupt Republicans just as quickly as they'd denounce Democrats. They also gave a ton of equal time to Libertarian views and the station really earned my respect.

Now? The local talent and the Libertarians have been almost completely shoved aside and marginalized in favor of rabid, neo-conservative, super-star hate-mongers and war-cheerleaders like Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and others of their ilk.

Sad. Very sad.