‘Infomercial King’ Kevin Trudeau Ordered to Jail
The contempt finding was the fourth of Trudeau’s career, which is also dotted with $2.5 million in prior settlements with the FTC for allegedly misleading claims for a host of products he pitched in infomercials. The 50-year-old Massachusetts native’s record also includes two felony fraud convictions from the early 1990s, for which he spent nearly two years in federal prison.
Hardly surprising, since this guy pretty much has a cell reserved for him, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this might be it.
For a brief and disturbing time, I worked at a call center that did customer service for Trudeau’s “Natural Cures” book. After an earlier FTC lawsuit for selling coral pills he said would cure cancer (which resulted in the same office I was working in getting raided by the FBI), he was prohibited from selling any health or nutritional supplements, but could still write books with recommendations as long as he covered them in sufficient disclaimers saying that he isn’t a doctor or providing actual medical advice.
That job was one of the more soul-crushing events of my life; the rule was that we all understood it was bullshit, and our job was to do anything it would take to placate callers who were upset with anything they had bought, for fear that they might complain to the authorities. We could refund every cent they’d spent, but also could have any other book or publication sent to them free of charge, so most of the people who called because the book was a scam ended up getting a bunch more scam literature in response. The only thing we couldn’t do was give them a membership to his “exclusive club,” since it was pretty much understood that that was reserved for the one who’d taken all the bait.
The funny thing is that having worked there makes scams like Glenn Beck’s or Dick Morris’ operations that much more transparent; it’s no surprise that Trudeau ended up orbiting the same wingnut drain as those two.