I've been dabbling with a theory, and it goes something along the lines of "Evil thinks big, but Good thinks small".<p>There is a <i>ton</i> of incentive for guys like this to scale big, and they can bootstrap it pretty easily once they have a profitable method. On the other hand, it's much tougher for a brand like Consumer Reports to do the same, because the effort is so much greater and the ROI is so much smaller. You simply don't make much money when you're un-selling stuff, and it's an eternal game of whack-a-mole fighting off scams.<p>So the "good guys" who would rage against these rip-offs end up thinking smaller, perhaps going after just one thing, like why this skin care offer is a scam. You get lost in the noise because you're stuck in a swamp of other evildoer affiliates who are more greatly incentivized to lie. Ultimately, there's very few <i>systematic</i> tools out there that can encompass on the number of niches his network can, and visibly tell the truth about them all.<p>Further, once a doer of good who's scaling starts to see success, the power begins to corrupt, and aligning with profitable evils becomes difficult to resist.<p>I see this problem at all levels, especially in corrupt governments. It just feels like we are currently systematically broken as a species. Good people may or may not be outnumbered, but we're most definitely out-<i>powered</i>.
Oh, that guy.<p>If this guy had dialed back the scam level by about half, he'd probably still be in business. There are lots of people trying to be him. Visit Black Hat World to meet some.<p>His values aren't that far from those of many startup companies. Grow at any cost. Use "dark patterns" to trick users. Hide things in the EULA. Don't ask too many questions about "affiliates". Make it hard to cancel. Google was fined $500 million when they were caught in the FBI's "sportsdrugs.com" sting. (The FBI had a fake drug lord who was supposedly trying to take over the athletic steroid business. Google actively helped him advertise.)
What a piece of trash this guy is. Not only is he behind a lot of those garbage ads everywhere, but once they suckered someone in, he managed to scam them by signing them up for reoccurring billing on their credit cards.
Reminds me of a guy that made millions selling from spammy looking single-page websites that would scroll on forever; aka long form sales letters. Believe the guy died racing a super car on a track; can't recall his name.
Here's a real gem, from an FTC official:<p>> There’s a fine line between shutting down the Internet and policing it<p>Straight out of a lobbyists mouth, I'd imagine. It has the classic "true, but only in certain contexts" thing going on - sure, it's a great argument against, say, SOPA, but as an argument against a simple legal requirement that big internet players do their part to reign obviously malicious advertising, it's pretty bogus.
It's horrible to understand how much of the content we consume for free online is paid for by these scams. His açai ads were all over fairly major publishers' websites. The content industry relies on hugely regressive exploitation of the gullible and unsophisticated, and adblockers are only making it more regressive in the short term.<p>LyricFind which licenses lyrics from major publishers to websites is another example. They would license content to for free if you included their ads for "ringtone" subscriptions which were added to monthly phone bills in a process few consumers understood or expected.