Talk radio and Fox conservatives fear-monger to keep their audience coming back. But a happy unintended consequence of constantly telling your followers that the nation is heading off the cliff is that it attracts advertisers who depend on stupid, ill-informed, terrified consumers. Like shady firms that sell gold! So: suddenly Glenn Beck's post-apocalyptic survival tips include amassing vast stores of gold, which you can purchase (at a massively inflated above-market price, of course) from Beck sponsor Goldline!

Here is a quote from a remarkably forthcoming Beck advertiser:

Peter Epstein, president of Merit Financial Services, which advertises on Beck's show, says gold retailers expect favorable coverage from commentators on whose shows they pay to advertise. "You pay anybody on any network and they say what you pay them to say," said Epstein. "They're bought and sold."

Yes. Well. But some people are not happy with their purchases:

In one such complaint, Mary Sisak of New Castle, Pa., wrote in August that she contacted Goldline because she saw a television ad featuring Beck, and online endorsements from Levin and Thompson. After spending $5,000 on Swiss Francs, Mary said she learned she could have purchased the same number of coins for $1,600 less.

"How could I be mislead by Glenn Beck, Fred Thompson and Marvin [sic] Levin?" she wrote.

I don't know, Mary. I just don't know.

No, it's not just "Some Imaginary Trend We Made Up From Our Imagination Cause It Seems Like The Sort of Thing That Would Happen In a Recession." Adults really are moving home to mom and dad's place, because the [DREAM JOB IN MANHATTAN] just couldn't afford to keep them on.

We won't make a joke because, ha, who knows who might be next? Maybe us! We're somewhat confident now that we've procured a more stable career, though: We rented a little jug from the United Homeless Organization, then we stand at a table with the jug, see—right outside the Starbucks on Spring Street—and shake it, and say "penny, nickel, dime or a quarter..." in a sing-songy voice until people feel guilty and give us their meager change. Then we keep that money, and the head of the UHO takes his cut and pays his rent and cable bill and shit.

It's all a scam, technically. Although, what, do you want your 15 cents back, cheap Starbucks bastards? If the people holding the jugs really are homeless, well, then, it's helping homelessness, so, shut up.

It's not so bad being homeless these days. You don't have to live with mom and dad. You don't have to worry about an underwater mortgage. You don't have to go bowling with other jerks who are unemployed in order to "network." You don't have to do much at all, except shake that jug of change, and worry about how you're going to meet your basic needs without dying in the cold, heartless streets.

So don't feel so bad about your current conditions. It could be worse, economically: You could be black! Ha. Oh. You are? Yea. You are screwed.
[Pic via]

The suit was probably inevitable. As we first reported, the Sacramento-based firm of Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has been looking for victims of scammy ads in games like Mafia Wars and Farmville to potentially file a class action suit. Less than a week later, the firm's suit has hit federal district court in Northern California.

You can read the initial complaint in full here.

Neither gaming startup Zynga nor social network Facebook actually originates the advertisements in question; instead, other companies take out ads in Zynga's games, which run on Facebook's network, and the two companies make reportedly large sums of money from the offers. Some of the ads trick users into signing up for unauthorized cell phone charges or expensive mail-order products like educational CDs, typically by disguising them as "free" offers or "free trials," or as part of an "online quiz." TechCrunch has run an aggressive series of articles, cataloged at the bottom of this post.

Zynga reportedly takes in close to one-third of its revenue from "commercial offers" like those, and Facebook does well too, as KC&R lawyers point out in their complaint. An excerpt (click to enlarge):

Swift's attorneys also point to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus' damning video confession that "I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues" in their complaint, indicating it will be a significant piece of courtroom evidence, just as we predicted.

The prospect of being on the hook for massive damages has to make both Zynga and Facebook's investors sweat. Facebook is the darling of Silicon Valley, with VCs having valued it in the billions of dollars, while Zynga counts the elite firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers among its major investors. Yet both companies have come to rely on greasy advertisers for much of their revenue; in addition to the game-ad scammers, Facebook is also sells ad to marketers who resort to tactics like using stolen pictures of apparent underaged girls to promote their products. If the company's are found to be liable of helping con customers by working with these sorts of slimeballs, it's hard to say where the payouts might end.

Below, an excerpt of the scams allegedly perpetrated on the lead plaintiff in the case, Rebecca Swift.

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Raphaël Labbé)

[Full court filing]

TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington began writing his high-profile posts exposing the misleading ads carried by Zynga on October 31. Four days later, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Zynga began issuing shares as part of its latest $15 million round of financing that included firms like the gold-standard Silicon Valley shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (past investments: Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc.), as PaidContent points out.

Of course, it took until Nov. 6 for video to emerge of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus admitting that some of the ads his company ran were "horrible." But we'd venture to guess that Zynga's investors, now into the startup for at least $54 million, would still have gone forward with their investment even that video emerged earlier. They care no more about Zynga's murky origins than they did about those of Zynga's chief clients like MySpace (born from a spam and spyware operation) and Facebook (which paid $65 million to settle claims it was founded on stolen technology). In Silicon Valley, the sins of the past are regularly washed away by infinite promise of the all-important future.

(Pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, by Joi Ito)

From today's press release:

Facebook fans will undoubtedly recognize the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year, unfriend.

unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year.

"Currency and potential longevity" sounds like something a real Senior Lexicographer would say. So how do I know the "Word of the Year" = "Scam of the Year"?

Take a look at the OUP Words of the Year for the past four years:

2008
Hypermiling - To attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one's car and one's driving techniques.

2007
Locavore - The "locavore" movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers' markets or even to grow or pick their own food... Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

2006
Carbon Neutral - Being carbon neutral involves calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions (your "carbon footprint"), reducing them where possible, and then balancing your remaining emissions, often by purchasing a carbon offset: paying to plant new trees or investing in "green" technologies such as solar and wind power.

2005
Podcast - a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar
program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio
player.

Don't you see? These are all just hacky trend pieces from that year, in lexicographic form! The OUP obviously knows their audience: Journalists and bloggers (ahem) looking for some excuse to take another dip in the honeypot and reuse those novel widgets and gizmos we've been hypnotically waving in front of your faces for the past year. (Here is a good example for "unfriend".)

The OUP itself all but admitted that the Word of the Year is nothing more than a silly marketing ploy. But each year, writers insist on treating it as some sort of important gauge of How We Live Now, because, you know, it's the freaking dictionary. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The folks at the New Oxford American Dictionary have picked "unfriend" as their annual Word of the Year for 2009, a testament to how much social media is affecting the lexicon.

What it really testifies to is the fact that the Times Style section should hire whoever picks the Word of the Year ASAP.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go hypermile my podcast.

(Also, MSNMoney has a funny typo, so they say "unfried" is the word of the year. Ha!)

Amid withering press from TechCrunch and other outlets, the Zynga CEO has finally removed scammy commercial offers from his company's online games, like Mafia Wars and Farmville. That's nice. But maybe the whole scandal could have been avoided if he'd taken a less skeptical take on his Harvard Business School ethics class. From his 2006 blog post about the class:

The school had this bullshit 3 week class called 'ethics' which we all took together at the outset of the program - guess it was to make sure we all had at least heard the term a few times and might feel more comfortable even using it...

Pincus goes on to tell how his amoral, investment-banker classmates defended a banker who left a sick Indian man behind to die in order to finish climbing a Himalayan mountain the banker had long wanted to conquer. Pincus accused his classmates of moral bankruptcy and became a black sheep, he says.

He was also aghast when a fellow student got off with a slap on the wrist after he was caught stuffing the ballot box in an election to head the school's Finance Club. Pincus thought he would be expelled or at least suspended for a year.

I'd soo love to know where that kid's career went and what he's doing today. He must be a major leader as he soo gets our system.

Pincus ended his blog post on an optimistic, pro-ethics note, saying that "this century's newest success stories" like Google, Bill Gates and eBay "are about authentic people taking responsibility and serving all stakeholders," i.e. acting ethically, donating money to charity, etc. Despite this conclusion, Pincus soon found himself on a darker path; he was soon doing "every horrible thing in the book to... get revenues right away" at Zynga, he told fellow entrepreneurs at a mixer earlier this year.

Said mixer wasn't the first time Pincus gave up a sleazy vibe; check out the tweets below from entrepreneur and former Valleywagger Alaska Miller. Apparently Pincus' ethics were derailed some time after he wrote that "authentic people" are the bright future of American business. It's hard to know whether to the blame that stumble on Pincus' obvious cynicism toward his Harvard ethics class — or on his failure to cling to his cynical conclusions more tightly through the years.

(Top pic: Pincus, by Joi Ito)

The Valley fad of social network games like Mafia Wars and Farmville disguise old-school scams, Mike Arrington has been demonstrating over at TechCrunch this weekend. High-revenue don of social networking games Zynga, which makes the aforementioned Mafia Wars and Farmville, gets one-third of its revenue from various shady "commercial offers" and lead-generation systems, Arrington reports. Here's how HotOrNot founder James Hong described the social networking cash scene in a TechCrunch comment:

The offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.... i'm pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.

Examples, via TechCrunch:

• "Users are offered in-game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey... They are told their results will be text messaged to them... and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription."
  
• "Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD... The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them."

There's an entire thriving "ecosystem" devoted to these sort of "deals," the sort of thing that in a different context might just be called a "crime ring." It's a profitable network, at least for the people at the top: Arrington estimates Facebook might be taking in $50 million per year from Zygna alone.

So, social networks are basically turning in to just another snakeoil sales channel in the mold of late-night 1-800 number commercials. Which sucks not only for the marks who've been duped but, ultimately, for Facebook's investors, since taking this sort of easy cash reduces internal pressure to come up with some sort of truly innovative revenue stream.

Not to mention what it does to user trust: Who's going to want to hand over their credit card information or even cell phone number to the likes of Facebook amid all these scams? (Answer: People who passed their "IQ test" with flying colors and a useless $10/month subscription.)

The Mets-owning Wilpon family actually made money on at leason one Madoff account. How's that for a "home run," EH?

The report shows that Mets LP, one of the team's financial arms, withdrew $570.5 million from two accounts it held with Mr. Madoff's company, $47.8 million more than it put in.

Dealbook notes that they had other Madoff accounts too, so they may come out with a net loss, but still. Pretty nifty. Now they're gonna get sued and have to give all that money back, because that's how it goes for the Mets (Luis Castillo).

Meanwhile the Yankees will clinch their World Series bid tonight. What a contrast. Big, big contrast.

Companies these days love to sell you their crap by assuring you that simply by purchasing their crap you are not just purchasing crap—you are actually doing good. In fact, if you don't purchase their crap, you likely suffer from a severe moral defect. Furthermore, your mundane purchasing choices are now decisions of great moral import. And they define who you are, as a person. Do you buy your mutt Pedigree® brand dog food, to support pet adoption? Or Milk Bone® brand dog snacks, to give canine companions to people in wheelchairs? If you're a good person, buy both! How can you spurn either cause by failing to buy the associated consumer product? Both of them are so fucking good.

Failing to purchase Milk Bones is tantamount to walking (jerk) right up to this wheelchair-bound man and killing his dog. Failing to buy Dawn dish soap is no different from hunting down a snow white baby seal, dousing him in crude oil, and shooting anyone who tries to clean off his soft, beautiful fur.

These companies are not fucking around any more, America. They have brought out the baby seals. That means no marketing tactic is too mawkish; no advertising icon is too cliched; no leap of logic is too grand. We must warn you, the consumer: This slope is as slippery as the grease-soaked coat of an otter in Valdez. Want to help some good cause? Buy the fucking store brand. Save money. Give that money to charity. You give these companies one nickel and we'll all be seeing baby seal logos on every fucking thing until we just throw up.

[Also, America? Stop buying those "Herbal Remedies." They're fake. God. ]

It was all a trick, by marketing people, to get you to buy body wash! The NYT digs deep into the dirty scam—it turns out that instead of being an honest appraisal of body wash's ability to engorge the loins of females, all those sexxxy Axe ads may have been tainted by hyperbole. Furthermore, girls were using body wash before boys, and now boys are using it which makes them totally gay, differently-designed packaging be damned! Like Big Tobacco, Big Body Wash gets you while you're young:

For men using body wash "to go mainstream like this it really has to be taught when boys are pubescent," she said. "One thing you can be sure of with pubescent boys, because of their hormones, is that they stink."

Just because we're stank and dumb is no reason to take advantage of us.

Nerds who love numbers so much they should marry them used to go into "quant" hedge funds and make like millions of dollars, but that business has fallen off, thanks to the work of algorithms devised by those same geniuses. The new way to make $125K right out of grad school: be a statistician. Moneymaking jobs are getting even more boring than "corporate lawyer," if you can imagine.

"I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians," said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. "And I'm not kidding."

Look, if the Poindexters have all the smarts and all the money, they cannot have all the sexy. It is just not fair. Leave the sexy for Arthur Kade. Do we need a supersexy master race of calculator-toting statisticians figuring out new ways to scam us online by telling us to wire money to some fictional character who will then give us a job, because we are unemployed? No thank you, we would prefer to be scammed by unsexy people.

We are also being scammed by inanimate Metrocard vending machines.

Do not lose hope, unsophisticated jobless suckers! We have a hot stock tip, just for you: a tattoo removal firm is holding an IPO. Get in now. This will be awsome.

Look, there's some "hope that the real estate market is beginning to recover." In Miami, a small amount of the huge pool of trash, useless condos are beginning to sell. And this mysterious "Beige Book" says "the recession is losing force or economies are beginning to stabilize." But not both!

That smells like success, economically speaking! Positive mental attitude=housing for everyone.

Luckily we've hedged our bets by buying a chunk of the marketing rights to the story of the Pink Panther jewel thieves. The rest of you: just put on a disguise, go to the ATM, withdraw all the money from your account, tell the bank someone stole your ATM card, let them refill your account, and repeat. It's the American way.

Interview Magazine, which has been mired in managerial chaos for months now (at minimum), is going through a management shakeup:

Brant Publications named Evanly Schindler, founder of the magazine BlackBook, president, and promoted Stephen Mooallem, an editor at Interview for six years, to editor in chief. Also, Karl Templer, who left the magazine this year, is returning to his former post, creative director.

Mr. Mooallem and Mr. Templer will report to Fabien Baron, the editorial director who recently returned to Interview, which had monthly circulation last year of 223,000. Mr. Schindler said he would continue as an owner and editor in chief of Tar, a twice-yearly arts magazine.

We'll know in a year or so whether this will do one god damn thing to help the magazine's fortunes.

CBS News was planning to retire their little voiceover of the late Walter Cronkite introducing Katie Couric's nightly broadcast, but now they're like, ah, fuck it, we're keeping it after all. Of greater concern to CBS: Walter Cronkite was 4% of its total nightly news viewership.

A 21 year-old chef in Arizona totally scammed his local paper into writing a story about how he got a fancy culinary scholarship and became "the youngest sous chef at the posh Compass Restaurant on top of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Phoenix." Basically he just wanted some publicity and made the whole story up. Just goes to show how easy it is to scam the working press, if you really want to. Outrageous. I mean, sure, it can happen to us, but to the Ahwatukee Foothills News? Disgraceful.

Long-haired Fox Business host/ bar-sitter Cody Willard is exactly as interesting as you would expect when he goes out at night.

Salt Lake County prosecutors filed charges late Thursday against Kari Michelle Ferrell, 22. She is now charged with one count of identity fraud and issuing a bad check, both third-degree felonies. She was also charged with two misdemeanor counts of issuing a bad check.

That's in addition to the $60,000 she was already charged with stealing. The new charges are related to bad checks, and opening a cable account in someone else's name. And hey, you think our commenters are bad? Here's some of the hometown sentiment:

[KSL.com, TribTowns.com]

New York Magazine explores this perplexing issue at length in a story this week. Theory #1: People hate her because she's a woman.

Ruth's problem seems to be a particularly female one. "It's the gender politics of the culture," says Gloria Steinem. "It's easier to blame the person with less power." And, she adds, why aren't people blaming her sons? "They would be much more likely to be in cahoots, because they were in the same professional field. And the answer is, they're men, that's why."

Theory #2: She's just a dumb lady.

According to a friend from high school, it would not have been difficult to keep Ruth in the dark. "I don't know if you fully understand the difference between you and us," says the woman in her late sixties. "When we were young, and the man came home for dinner, he was the king of the house and we catered to him … We were the type of people who, if your husband came home and said, ‘Sign this,' you wouldn't ask why. If he asked you to sign it, you would sign it."

Theory #3: Oh maybe it's this .

"He conferred with her on everything. The idea that she didn't know anything is laughable," says the longtime Madoff employee.

Such a complicated issue, the whims of the public opinion! Really, where are these alleged people who have mixed feelings about, or even feel sympathy for, Ruth Madoff? We must smoke out this rare creature. With a poll. Vote below, and the truth will be revealed. [NYM. Pic: AP]

1. Trying—and failing—to forgive.

Julie Behar lost $2.6 million; her children lost their trust fund; her mom lost millions as well. But now she's started saving again, concentrating on her children's futures, and hoping for the best. She knows that holding anger in her heart is no way to live. How about it, Julie—do you think you can forgive this man? "I'M NOT accepting Bernard Madoff's apology." Ah. I see. Okay.

2. Trying—and failing—to move on.

Let's just focus on what we need to do now, okay? The past is the past. There are so many things to do now. Phyllis Molchatsky lost $2 million and may lose her house, but she's moving on by...losing her faith in the government, the SEC, the American Way, and god. "I think part of me died that day I learned of the fraud, along with so many hopes and dreams for the future." Oh. Well. That's depressing as fuck.

3. RAGE!

This rage is Biblical:

"I told the judge that when Bernard Madoff leaves prison, which means after his death, that he will then go down to the depths of hell where he'll join those other people who are in the mouths of Satan," Burt Ross, the former mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., who lost $5 million with Mr. Madoff, told the crowded press corps outside the courthouse.

You people will die of stress before Madoff does.
[Read em all! And weep.]

An appeals court has awarded $2.1 million to two gallery owners who say they were duped into selling Kinkade's schlock, then double-crossed by the Godly master himself in a scheme designed to let Kinkade buy out his own company at a low price:

In its February 2006 decision, the arbitration panel said Kinkade and other company officials used terms like "partner," "trust," "Christian" and "God" to create "a certain religious environment designed to instill a special relationship of trust" with the couple.

What the company didn't tell them, said their attorney, was that they would have to sell Kinkade's works at minimum retail prices while the artist undercut them with discount sales, some of which he made himself on cable television.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.It was part of a plan, they claimed, to lower the value of the publicly traded company before Kinkade bought it in 2004, at steep losses to many investors.

Ruining the living rooms of half of the grandparents' houses in the Midwest wasn't enough for you, you monster?
[SF Chronicle via Unbeige]

Very Short List was, from the beginning, an act of hubris. In 2007, Diller failed to buy Daily Candy, losing out to former AOL executive Bob Pittman. So the IAC chairman decided to round up some buddies and start and shopping list of his own. If Dany Levy could make a mint, why couldn't they?

Besides, VSL would be highbrow where Daily Candy was mass market, targeting a "smart set" of billionaires looking for a shortcut to cultural literacy. Diller is said to have seeded the list with own rich friends, but the early results were unimpressive, at least from a media standpoint: The list reportedly had collected just 20,000 subscribers.

By last year it was up to 100,000 subscribers; now it's 200,000. No matter: It's widely believed a dud, with no real revenues to speak of. Diller needs to dispense with VSL. Which means he needs, as P.T. Barnum would put it, a sucker. Luckily, he may have found one.

A quick sketch of the characters in this shakedown:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Barry Diller - The wily old ringleader. A consummate dealmaker who got the better of his evil master John "Darth Vader" Malone in a court fight over IAC. VSL was once his favorite toy; he once told a reporter, ""Without Very Short List, I would be much diminished." But he's moved on. He's putting $18 million into the Daily Beast, his new favorite toy.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser. Michael Jackson, the legman. A highflying television executive in Britain, Jackson has been vexed by the failure of VSL.A sale would help Jackson save face. After all, he co-founded VSL and has overseen it at IAC.

Yes, VSL has 200,000 email addresses. But one source tells us only 40,000 of readers open a typical mailing. And Jackson would appear to have fallen out with Diller, losing his title as IAC's president of programming right around the time Tine Brown came on board for the Beast. We hear his remaining portfolio at IAC consists entirely of VSL.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Kurt Andersen, the pretty girl (a.k.a. the bait). Like Diller and Jackson, Andersen was also a founder and also wants to save face. But he has a unique asset: His experience as a founder and writer at places like Spy, New York, the New Yorker and Inside.com help make VSL — or at least a meeting with VSL — attractive to prospective rubesinvestors or buyers.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Jared Kushner, The Mark. The 28-year-old media mogul came into possession of the New York Observer just as the newspaper industry entered its death throes. He's rumored to be in talks with Diller about a joint venture.

While Kushner is likely impressed with VSL's 200,000 subscribers, he should ask IAC for specifics about the list's "open rate" — the number of subscribers who actually read it. Then, if he still wants to buy after learning only a fifth of readers do so, he should ask about those frequent ads from the blog Design Observer. Run, we hear, by Andersen's friends, the site is unlikely paying much, if anything, for the spots.

It might just be too late: Observer scuttlebutt has it that the "joint partnership" would amount to the newspapers' remaining staff writing the VSL. In that case, chalk another one up for Diller, an operator no more ruthless than his New York peers would expect him to be.

(Michael R. Jackson pic via Cityfile; top Diller pick by Esther Dyson on Flickr.)