I recently rediscovered this blog, having completely forgotten my experiments here. So it goes!

If you’re looking for more, from gaming to atheism to skepticism in general, come find me over at:

http://site29a.com – the Hexadecimal Number of the Beast – home of the Random Poe Generator!

What I want to point out is that this woman doesn’t actually believe she’s a scam artist – but she does believe that she can look at photographs and tell you if the people involved are living and dead.

The important thing to note here is that she uses cold reading techniques to try to confirm her statements with Randi – she throws out extra data, trying to indicate how well she knows these souls, looking for ‘hits’ – but Randi gives her no approval one way or another.

Sadly, it’s very easy to delude yourself when you seek outside confirmation. Is she deliberately trying to throw this out there as false? no. But she’s definitely not doing anything WRONG – she’s just mistaken as to what rate of success trumps chance, and is operating from conversational cues.

Or so I think, anyway.

It was purely for amusement, I thought. I mean, who believes the white guy with a hokey gypsy accent and the shiny, modern Tarot deck picked up for ten bucks at the local new age store? It only got weird when people I knew, my friends who’d come by to see the show, started asking me for readings ‘off-camera’, claiming how ‘talented’ I was and how incredible the experience was for them, and how they never knew anyone so accurate…

… er. It was a trick. A show. Nothing more.

It was, however, a valuable experience – it taught me how the entire scam works, from an inside perspective, and how easy it really is to get caught up in the heady power of it all. And.. frankly? I was by no means a pro – I was just decently observant. Drawing on that experience, let me lay out for you psychic hopefuls the anatomy of the scam – how it works, so that when you experience it you may get an alarm bell or two.

Ready?

• Establish the ambiance.Pretty simple statement, that one – but every stage performer will tell you exactly the same thing. You cannot get people to suspend their disbelief if you don’t create a scene consistent with their expectations, and internally consistent with the activity.

  Riding a bicycle through a renfaire is /unacceptable/. Ideally, the person walking through the fairground in street clothes should feel welcome, but slightly out of place – it encourages them to get into the spirit of the event, to buy hats and costuming, and to want to get to know about the craftwork, the clothing, the anachronism – and, well, it helps them get involved in the fun. Similarly, when you go to a film or to a stage show, certain things happen to assist you in suspending your assumption that what you’re watching isn’t real. They dim the lights, work with consistent costuming. They never acknowledge the camera (thus divorcing your observation from the event) or the audience – unless acknowledging the audience brings you in to the scene.

  Heavy curtains and closed doors minimize outside noise. Cellphones are turned off. Direct lighting (Where you can see the bulb) is kept to a minimum. Attention is hyperfocused.

  Similarly, if you’re going to run a psychic reading, you do much the same thing: make sure your space reflects expectation. Make sure your own costuming and outfit fit the paradigm you intend to bring to the table. Make sure your props suit your patter – don’t pull out shining and steel if you’re doing the rustic gypsy, and if you’re Jon Edwards, don’t pull out a dowsing rod. It all has to be built to a single, easily believed picture.

  When the mark crosses your threshold, they have to enter your world – it makes them predisposed to believe you.

• Involve the mark.

  It isn’t simple enough to just have them come in and start the patter – the game absolutely must include two way communication and audience participation.

  You see, cold reading is a game that involves THEM telling YOU everything, and you spitting it back up to them in a format they can accept as originating with you. It involves asking magician’s questions – questions that if answered simply allow you to control the conversation and get an outcome that makes you look darned good – and it tends to impart a bias in the mind of the participant that they can actually affect the outcome… that their choices matter.

  All of the best psychics know that if you let them, your ‘client’ will handle the whole thing themselves. By adding a subtle bit of misdirection, you can set it up so that they’ll just willingly forget to notice that they’ve given you everything.

  My own personal patter was with the cards – I would go on about the fact that no one visits the Cards without having a question in mind, that there is always something they seek to answer, a story they hope to know the ending to. I would tell them how the cards could show them, if their mind was open.

  I’d have them concentrate on the cards, shuffle the cards until it ‘felt right’. I would tell them that shuffling disrupted the energies of those who had used the deck before, and then handling the cards would infuse their own question with them. I’d talk easily, walking them through every step in the process – just like a magician doing a card trick.

  And – you see – they believed that the cards mattered. They’d studiously work with them, shuffle them, cut them – and I would studiously NOT touch them, for fear of contaminating them with my own energies.

  And then I’d have them lay out the deck into three piles. By now, their eyes were invariably wide – and they were leaning forward, hoping I’d have something to offer them.

• Ask for the answer.

  Once they’re ‘in’ – once they’re focused on your meaningless object, you throw in a misdirection that would make David Copperfield proud.

  “You have shuffled the cards – you have focused on your question – and now you have a choice. You can tell me,” I would say, very seriously and earnestly, “what your question is – and I will interpret the cards specifically for that answer. Or, you can keep your question to yourself – and the answer will be more general, and you will have to delve into its deeper meaning yourself. Do you wish me to guide you, or would you rather guide yourself, mm?”

  … eight times out of ten, they’d tell me their question. The actual /whole point/ – they’d lay it out, right in front of me.

  “Is my husband cheating?”

  “Is my daughter going to do well at school?”

  “What will happen if I make at work?”

• Cater to reactions.

  From here, I had three paths. If the answer was truly complex, I could look at them and say, “You already know what you hope will be – the cards, too, know – let us see what they say – ” … and I would let the ‘cards’ build toward the answer they already hoped (or feared) was true. You tailor, then, your patter to match their reactions to what you say – if they frown when you talk about their husband smelling of someone’s perfume, you quickly shift to another ‘tell’ – they’ll never remember the one you abandoned.

  If the answer is more frivolous, or simple – I’d let the cards throw it out, and riff on the theme that seemed to get them more excited.

• Let them feed you more data.

  My routine involved turning over three cards – the past that leads you to the question, the question in the context of why you asked it, and the answer the cards give.

  You see, don’t you?

  The first card invited them to speak of it – to correct me if I got their past wrong, to offer compelling imagery and convince them I already knew it all, so telling me was alright.

  The second card allowed me to get them to frame their question in context. “Do you really fear he’s cheating? The card implies that you know the answer already..”

  … and the third card? The third card would let me feed them a bit of logical advice without actually addressing the issue.

And that’s /it/. that’s all there is to it – no one will come and get advice from a housewife about their kid’s college careers – but someone with a solid amount of common sense, observational ability, and enough showmanship can get you to take their advice for fifty bucks and a good show.

But there’s nothing at all psychic about it.

My wife, you see, is unable to have children for medical reasons. Because of that, and because she wishes to, she’s been the target of more smiling glad-handing then I really care to remember. Time after time, someone offers a miraculous cure for something, and she gets all hopeful – only to face the inevetable dissapointment when it falls apart or doesn’t work as advertised. If it can happen to her – a reasonably intelligent, very critical soul – I fear how often it happens to others.

The point of this particular essay is to arm you against quackery – to give you the tools you need to discern whether the new fantastic cure you’re looking at is likely to have bearing on the condition you’re dealing with. You can level this at your doctor as easily as you can that wall of homeopathic remedies. Believe me, one of them will pass our test, and one of them won’t. There are five telltale signs of snake oil. If what you’re looking into matches ANY of these signs… beware.

• Appeal to the Wisdom of the Ancients.

  All humans have a facination with What Has Come Before. We are entranced and enthralled by history, and we look to it for guidance for our present actions. This is all good! However, we have a tendency to associate wisdom with age. Look at popular literature, adventure stories – heck, Indiana Jones. Ancient cultures, different and mystic, believing in ways we have laid aside today, are intriguing. Mysterious. They facinate us – we see their culture, do not wholly understand how it worked, how it came together, how they treated each other, what their lives were like, and we wonder. We wonder what they knew that we don’t, we question what was lost when their culture failed.

  Can we rediscover wisdom from ancient people?

  Well, yes. Science does it all the time. We discover the basis behind traditions, and we uncover whether the rituals and ungents used had real properties or were just so much mumbling and rubbing and hope.

  Unfortunately, many snake oils take our tendency to honor the past and turn it into an appeal to illogic. Let me show you the difference:

  The ancient Greeks discovered one modern remedy. They learned that a tea made from the bark of the willow tree was efficacious in the treatment of minor aches and pains, headaches, and inflammation. Over the intervening centuries, scientists isolated the ingredient that proved so incredibly useful: acetylsalicylic acid. Concentrated and purified, it proved even more effective.. and gained the common trade name “Aspirin”. It’s used every day to treat everything from headaches to heart attack and stroke risk. It is not, however, marketed with statements like “ancient medicines uncovered!” or “Wisdom of the ancient greeks revealed!”. It works. It’s marketed on what it does, not who made it.

  On the other hand, take a look at this one, from http://herbanpharmer.com :

  We carefully handcraft our herbal products in small batches, and formulate our preparations according to the ancient wisdom of Chinese Medicine. Unlike the many products on the market that focus primarily on pain relief with strong, unpleasant odors, our preparations are formulated to provide significant therapeutic value.

  … these are Red Herrings. We handcraft them. And? We formulate them according to Ancient Wisdom. And? They smell good. And? These points are certainly interesting, but none of them speak for whether or not the stuff actually works, only that Ancient Wisdom says they do.

  Be very suspicious.

• Unversal Claims of Effectiveness.

  No medicine or technique is universally effective. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. ZERO. Medicines all do something – they have a specific interaction with the body based on their chemical makeup and your chemical makeup. Any medicine or technique that claims to cure everything is probably lying to you.A permutation of this is heavily common in the ‘detoxification’ industry: “toxins” cause all your problems, and “detoxing” cures them. Check out this excerpt from http://www.healthy.net :

  Toxicity is of much greater concern in the twentieth century than ever before. There are many new and stronger chemicals, air and water pollution, radiation and nuclear power. We ingest new chemicals, use more drugs of all kinds, eat more sugar and refined foods, and daily abuse ourselves with various stimulants and sedatives. The incidence of many toxicity diseases has increased as well. Cancer and cardiovascular disease are two of the main ones. Arthritis, allergies, obesity, and many skin problems are others. In addition, a wide range of symptoms, such as headaches, fatigue, pains, coughs, gastrointestinal problems, and problems from immune weakness, can all be related to toxicity.

  Toxicity occurs on two basic levels–external and internal. We can acquire toxins from our environment by breathing them, by ingesting them, or through physical contact with them. Chapter 11, Environmental Aspects of Nutrition, deals with chemical aspects of food and how they influence our lives and health. We all are exposed to toxins daily. We eat and drink them and impose them upon ourselves repeatedly and regularly. Most drugs, food additives, and allergens can create toxic elements in the body. In fact, any substance can have toxicity–water, sodium, and almost all nutrients can be a problem in certain circumstances.

  This all seems logical, doesn’t it? Except – it makes very little sense, when taken in its component parts. Of course you can drown in water (and there is such a thing as Water Intoxication that can be potentially fatal) … even distilled water can be harmful! The thing is – “toxins” are not the universal bogeyman. Generic remedies are also not a cure – and taking a dozen pills a day to ‘detoxify’ certainly makes pill manufacturers rich and has very limited success.

  What’s important to know here is that most people confuse Correlation and Causation – and, worse, they misunderstand their own body’s ability to heal. Simply, they take a pill, the problem goes away, and they hail the pill as the solver of said problem.

  Unfortunately, that’s not often true. The human body’s ability to repair itself is absolutely incredible. Given that most medical conditions actually are “self-terminating” – that is, they would go away in time without medical intervention – it becomes very easy to make connections between unrelated actions as it subjectively seems that the pill actually did something. Correlation – you took the pill and healed – does not equal causation – BECAUSE you took the pill you healed.

  Beware any panacea – any cure-all. Medicines are tailored to specific conditions; one glass of fruit juice does not cure both cancer AND arthritis. I promise.

• Nonstandard Marketing Practices

  Medicines are marketed and sold as they are because it is simply the most effective way to get things that work into the hands of people that need them. While often a new product in other spheres begins as a late-night infomercial, medicine is an entirely different story.You see, pharmacies exist to make money off of your illness – this is true. The service they provide is very specific, and represents an important, profit-driven component of our medical system. I’ll be the first to tell you that corporations are in fact soulless (CVS offers homeopathic remedies, for instance) – and pharmacies are certainly no authority on effectiveness! Because of that, however, you must ask the question:

  Why isn’t this being sold to everybody, through standard channels?

  Look closely, and you’ll find the answer’s usually one of three reasons. First, the item is horrifically overpriced relative to other items in the same sector – e.g. Tunguska Blast’s fruit juice and juice sprays. Second, the item is no different than a product already being sold through existing channels. Third, the product is deceptively marketed, that is – it does not actually contain the ingredients it expresses or its supposed effect is too far-fetched to be believable in the context of a store shelf.

  If the only way you can buy this miracle cure is through multilevel marketing or mail order, be very, very suspicious of its claims. It’s not absolutely certain that it’s worthless, but it’s a darned good indicator that it probably is.

  After all, if you had something so amazing that everyone and their mother should be using it, wouldn’t you be trying to sell it at Wal-Mart?

• Overreliance on Testimonial Evidence.

  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say something that will probably, one day, get me lynched:Testimonials about the effectiveness of a product are utterly and completely worthless for determining the value of that product.

  Period. There’s no way around this one.

  If you’re on the product’s website, do you honestly believe you’re going to see negative reviews? Do you really, earnestly believe they’re even going to publish them? Worse, if “Irma” from “Washington” is telling you how amazing her experiences with CureMeGood products have been.. do you have any guarantee of this person’s existence? Any empirical evidence that, even should she exist, she’s not the site author’s mother?

  So many people are taken in by so many of these false hopes that it’s not unusual to even get legitimate testimonials from happy customers that took their placebo and actually recovered.. but those testimonials are not, in any way, validatable. They aren’t good data, and aren’t good enough for you to spend money on. Most marketers will even tell you that testimonials are a questionable marketing tactic, used best in selling services and then only with full references – verifiable testimonials have meaning.

  The difference is simple: if you are selling a service someone else has used, this does imply that the service is useful. However, if your potential customer can’t call up your previous customer and ask them questions about your service, they have no guarantee of the veracity of the claim you make.

  Testimonials are a powerful marketing tool when used in conjuction with actual data, with verifiable clients and with supporting details. Most panaceas, however, rely on testimonials that fill pages with unverifiable gushing about how amazing the product actually is. This should arouse suspicion, not trust – if the product really worked, you really wouldn’t need all these people telling you so.

• Piling on the Red Herrings

  Red Herrings are, in essence, facts that may be true but have no bearing on what it is you’re presenting. Snake Oil salesmen love to present tons of facts – “40% of men suffer from hair loss!” that may, in themselves, be true … but have very little bearing on whether the product they’re presenting you is actually useful for curing you of you troubles. Here’s a good example from my favorite snake oil over at CyberWize:

  

  Notice that this graph, while very pretty and certainly offering a fact about medicine in general… doesn’t actually SAY anything about their own product. It is very, very true that oral sprays are absorbed faster and easier than, say, pills – but what does that have to do with whether or not their product cures you of anything at all?

  Getting your fruit juice fix faster has no bearing on whether or not the fruit juice makes you honestly healthier. It’s just.. meaningless. Snake oil’s loaded down with this stuff, however, often under the FDA rules of disclosure as opposed to the stricter rules of the medical community.

And that’s it. Better armed, here’s hoping you’ll spot this garbage before it thieves cash out of your pocket.

It wasn’t my first exposure to a scam – but it was one of the most abjectly repellant ones I’ve ever seen.

I tasted his fruit juice, and listened to his speil.  I watched as he preached to the crowd and pulled people in to the idea of not only getting very very healthy, but getting rich while doing so.  After all, if you’re going to have a panacea – what better way to sell it than to get a multilevel marketing scheme going at the same time?

I was less brave, then, and while I didn’t fall for the pitch, I didn’t stand up and say anything either.  To this day, I regret it.   Consider this, then, me standing up.  So.  Let’s take a long, hard look at Tunguska Blast.

Now, let me start this by saying I like fruit juice as much as the next guy, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting a shotglass of free fruit juice.  It even tastes pretty darned good.   

And check this out!  It does all /sorts/ of neat stuff:

from the tunguska blast website -

Wow.

I mean, look at that – Energy.  Stamina.  Immune System.  Mental Clarity.  Physical Performance – is this fruit juice or a marital aid that helps you remember your anniversary?

*cough* 

Here’s another blurb from the tunguska site:

Tunguska Mist sprays are proprietary blends, formulated with more than 20 different adaptogens, plus other herbs and plants known to be rich in phytonutrients. Because they deliver clear benefits, adaptogens are generating enthusiasm worldwide. CyberWize is the leading seller of adaptogens in the world, with each of its powerful Tunguska Mist formulas blending up to 14 adaptogens into fast-acting sprays targeted to support specific body systems.

Now.. remember, I’m no scientist.  I’ll be the first to admit that – but as I sat in the speil listening to the excited and happy consumers of this stuff, as the personal testimonials began to mount, I realized that this was far more than mere fruit juice.   This stuff cured cancer, caused weight loss, satisfied spouses, and made the work day more bearable.  The more you listened, the more you realized that it wouldn’t feel out of place for someone to loudly announce that it allowed you to walk on water and made the blind see.  It’s That Good.

My personal hookum detector started to go off.  

When the very well-dressed man started talking about how YOU could GET RICH with a multilevel marketing plan if you just bought in now?   I knew I had a real winner on my hands.

Let’s start by stating a real truth here, folks:

No one actually gets rich without work.  Not even if a man in a nice suit with a Rolex tells you otherwise.

Multilevel Marketing is a variation of the Ponzi Scheme, which is a grifter’s trick that’s been around forever.  In a classic Ponzi, a man walks up to you and claims he has a surefire investment opportunity, capable of remarkable returns without any risk at all.  All you have to do is get five friends to buy in, too – and they’ll go out and get their friends, and soon enough you’ll start seeing returns as everyone’s big investment matures!  And if you’re on the top of the pyramid, you’ll get a little piece of everybody underneath you.  It’s a scam, though – don’t forget.  The grifter pays you out of the ‘donations’ given from those below you in the pyramid, and pockets twenty cents out of every dollar.  As long as he keeps getting new members, he can keep paying folks down the pyramid to go out and get him more members.  

Of course, it eventually hits critical mass, and the people at the bottom never see a return on their initial investment.  There’s nothing being invested, after all – the wealth is all being funneled to the folks at the top of the pyramid.  Thus, the ‘scam’ part.  When no new members join, the bottom falls out, and everyone’s honestly left with nothing at all.

Multilevel Marketing is quasi-legal, while a Ponzi scheme isn’t, because your membership in the program also involves buying something.  There’s a manufacturing chain and a product sold – you can’t be a member of the pyramid without pumping cash into it every month, and you get something for your trouble.  Thus, it really is an investment to be part of the pyramid, and every locked-in buyer you can get underneath you should theoretically funnel you a little cash.  Get a lot of locked-in buyers, and profit, right?

Well, it’s not that simple, either.  Classic MLM pyramids have an upper limit on how many people can be on your direct ‘tier’ – the people below you that funnel you the highest proportion of their monthly buy-in.  Once those slots are full, you’re now into diminishing returns:  you’re getting ‘customers’ under your own people’s tiers, and the money they put in is funneled first to them, then to you.  This ensures they  go out and recruit, too, you see?

I hope you’re starting to see the trouble, though.  How much markup do you have to have to be able to pay all these people?

When I went to this marketing meeting, they were selling four thirty-two ounce bottles for about $200 (in fact, they still are:)

Tunguska Blast, 32oz – 4 Pack 
A Powerful Dietary Supplement 

Four – 32 Fl Oz Bottles

———  $210.00

 

Check out the new marketing plan from their website!

Tunguska Mist – Juice X 
Daily essentials in a liquid spray 

.75 Fl Oz – 30 Servings

———–  $24.99

 

But that price is offered to all members, oh, with requisite discounts and the like to ensure you feel like you’re getting a deal.  The bottles look pretty darned good, too.   

The thing is – if it offered some sort of significant health benefit, you’d be all over this, right?  Right?   Well – here’s the ingredients list (for the stuff that isn’t just fruit juice – I got this from their website - check the ‘ingredients’ link at the bottom of the page.):

- Eleuthero, Chineese Magnolia Vine, Manchurian Thorn Tree, Hawthorne Berry, Sargent Viburnum, Licorice Root, Maral Root, Russian Mountain Ash, Chaga Mushroom, Golden Root, American Ginseng, Korean Red Ginseng, Jiaogulan, He Shou Wu…

… the list goes on. Nummy, hmm? Every ingredient is rife with amazing and good things, “…enchances cell communication”, says the entry on Coji Wolfberry, “unsurpassed in its ability to provide deep, primordial energy” reads He Shou Wu.

… these are null phrases.   They are utterly, and completely, meaningless.  What the heck is primordial energy?  HOW does it enhance cell communication?  

You.  Are buying.  Fruit Juice.

In other words, this ultimately becomes the worst kind of scam:  multilevel marketing to help you get rich (and it never will) coupled with an appeal to holistic health using meaningless catchphrases and obfuscated claims to benefit.  Worse, it’s functionally equivalent to going to wal-mart or your local pharmacy and buying these nutritional suppliments in pill form for a quarter of the price, and  (if these suppliments actually do do anything more than a good multivitamin offers) likely a quarter of the effectiveness due to dilution.. nowhere do they say just how much you get, after all.  Only that it’s in there.   There are appeals to authority – the whole page full of references to research papers with not a single link in sight, for instance, and images of test tubes and beakers.  There are appeals to ancient wisdom, red herrings all over the absorption rate based on delivery system – it’s an absolute mess designed to get you to do one thing:

Give them money for fruit juice.

Really, really expensive fruit juice.

And I said all that without taking a breath.  Aren’t you impressed?

This ‘blog, however, is a little different.  It exists because of outrage.  Anger.  Pure annoyance and snarliness that grows worse and worse as I grow older.  Like Don Quixote, I am setting out to tilt at a massive windmill.. one that others have tilted at before, and with limited success.  Luminaries like James Randi and modern masters like Brian Dunning – you’ll see their links to the right – have made entire careers out of trying to show people what I’m setting out to show people, and I have no basis for believing in success where they’ve failed.

What makes me different, however … well.  

I’m a businessman, not a scientist.  I’m a pedagogue, not a magician.  I am a normal schlub like everyone else, one who’s watched too many people get sucked in (as I have, once or twice!) by unspported promises from unscrupulous people, or .. worse.. the dupes of those people who promise everything for nothing at all.

And I’m tired of it.

I’m tired of cheats, tired of scams.  I’m tired of people who take advantage of the trust of others – and you know?  I’m ready to do my part to take them down.

So – that’s what this weblog is.  It’s some small attempt to expose, decry, batter, break and ultimately end the scams you face every day.  If we didn’t give ‘em money… well.  There’d be no point.

So welcome.  Feel free to come in, feel free to spread the word if it is even somewhat helpful.  Above all?  Listen to everyone, and question everything.  It’ll keep your wallet fatter, if nothing else.