mr resourceful

scams on linkedin: single mom's teeth drop two dress-sizes thanks to simple pact with satan

 
Those teeth whitening scams: yes, they're immoral, but they're object lessons in developing pervasive web-presence...

Thanks for all your emails asking me to post something about my recent dental history.  You'll be fascinated to hear that I went for a check up only last week!  The dentist, who seemed to me a little hung-over, spent just under four seconds moving my top lip around and then said, 'You have a boring mouth,' and then I got up and went back to reception and paid £19. 

So I didn't get much out of the experience.  But it did enabled me to empathise, almost, with the friend who emailed me recently to share how she managed to get herself conned rotten by one of those teeth whitening scammers (the company in question was 'Dazzlesmile', in case you're interested). 

Driven by wicked vanity, she'd clicked on one of those clearly nefarious links that play on our implicit trust of the Ordinary Person:

Don't pay for dental treatment!  Single mom discovers teeth secret to white teeth!

Note the brilliance of the tactic.  The ad's credentials are entirely implicit.  Indeed, we're led to constuct our own back-story for our unmarried discoverer.  We're supposed to imagine a woman too busy and financially strapped to pay for dental treatment, having being abandoned by her husband, who presumably left her for someone with superior teeth.  Who better than this careworn everywoman to help us turn the tables on those greedy, grasping dentists, and navigate us towards esoteric tooth wisdom?

And that's another great trick: warn your audience against paying 'the establishment' for knowledge.

The ads are backed up by online marketing that effectively sews up the entire internet.  Marvellously, there are myriad 'independent review' sites (dazzlesmile-dot-something-or-other) which attest to the legitimacy of the offer and the efficacy of the tooth-meltingly dangerous untested peroxide formula product.

I've noticed they even have a presence on Linkedin.  Melissa Oliver of 'Molimedia' advertises for localconsumernews.com, which peddles whitening products and whose smallprint is a masterpiece of opacity.  Ironically, perhaps, I've found no other mention of 'Molimedia' anywhere on the internet.

Charming reps also maintain a constant presence on internet complaints boards, assuring disgusted buyers that their offers are kosher and that un-subscription is easy...

These teeth-whitening operations are stunningly well-organised.  Similarly sophisticated is the way they remain withing the bounds of legality by using misdirection and sleight-of-verbiage.  Those of us interested in internet marketing could learn a lot from these industrious scumbags.

 

By the way...

Here's the only 'secret' you need to know: don't click on these ads, and if you do, out of curiosity or lunacy or whatever, don't relinquish your bank details in order to get a 'free sample'.  I guarantee you will end up sobbing down a phone to your credit card company. 

The woman to whom I spoke is still paying £10 a month on her Virgin credit card - and she cancelled immediately after signing up, having realised she'd made a monstrous error.  According to Virgin, she's one of the lucky ones; some people are being forced to pay thousands per year.  And although Virgin can help to stop the payments, there's no way to recoup the money already lost.

'Oh, give over,' you say.  'Surely I can get the free sample, then tell my credit card company to cancel the standing order before the company starts helping itself to my money?'

Nope!

'Well, then, I'll cancel my credit card and escape!'

You're not Piers Shonks, Dragon Slayer.  You can't  cheat the devil.  You've actually signed up to a binding contract with a legion of companies, and in order to escape it you need to hunt them all down.

It's a modern-day reworking of Doctor Faustus!  (Note also the intervention of a blessed Virgin, a la Faustus predecessor Theophilus of Adana!)

The tricked woman told me that Virgin has had to set up a department specifically to deal with these kind of scams, as droves of people have been phoning to cancel Virgin cards, hoping that by cancelling their cards they might escape the satanic contracts they've made.  Apparently the best that Virgin can do is arrange a conference call with all of the companies, so you can try to hack off all of the hydra's heads in one go. 

Her conference call is at 4 pm today.  I'll let you know what happens.

Now, I know that you aren't the kind of gullible person who'd fall for one of these scams.  But neither is my friend.  She's usually the most sceptical person on earth.  What's more, the operators at Virgin to whom she's spoken report that almost everybody coming to them with teeth-scam problems says the same thing: I feel so stupid!  I never fall for this sort of thing!

Was black magic at play, perhaps?  Did the creators of these scams make their own diabolical contracts with his infernal majesty in return for (no doubt bloody immense) wealth?

If so, let's hope that the devil insists on full payment for delivering on his side of the bargain.

By the way, your teeth look fine.  Boring, even.  Brush, floss, and avoid sugar, too much coffee, tempting shortcuts, and pacts with Satan.

 

More devilishness:

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Off-site :

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the gypping point

St Bart's Hospital and the London NHS Trust have announced that installing the Cerner Millennium system has left them with a backlog of at least 14,000 patients whose records are lying around forgotten on metaphorical guerneys.  I've kept a lazy eye on the Cerner saga for a while, and it always looked like one of those snowballing disasters that seems to take place whenever the government attempts a vast IT rollout.

Moral of the story: vast plans gang aft agley.

An IT system may look pretty good in principle, and yet, like communism or prawn Primula, be incompatible with humans.  Especially large numbers of humans.  The annoying thing is, with a rollout so ponderously huge, after a certain point you've invested so much in the system that you can't scrap it even though you know it's a turkey.  You've reached what you might call the gypping point - the point at which you've spent so much time and money and effort making a bad thing work that you feel obligated to keep paying for it rather than cut your losses and go elsewhere.  The NHS, if I remember rightly, reached that point in January.   Now they’re stuck with crazy backlogs, although the NHS Trust assures us that it has “no evidence… that any patient has come to clinical harm because of the backlog."

Does that mean that no evidence exists, or that it’s in a zip file that nobody knows how to open?

Folks who design bridges understand the problems of doing things on a big scale.  Your balsa wood design might happily stand up on your desk without toppling over, but the same model, when made of some sort of metal and stretched across a river, comes under all sorts of pressures (winds, gravity, the undead, earth pressure, cars, acts of divine judgement) whose effects are hard to simulate at design level.  So those bridge designers have to get to grips with some pretty esoteric physics.  With regard to implementing a new IT system, I'm not entirely confident that the NHS went as far as testing their balsa-wood bridge with some matchbox Corvettes and a hairdryer.

What's the answer?  How, when attempting to implement large-scale change, do you safeguard against being forced past a gypping point?

 

Not sure.  Although I’d say that it’s probably a good time to train as a Millennium developer.

 

 

More in-depth technological commentary:

 

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