Television pitchman Kevin Trudeau was sentenced to 10 years in prison because over 800,000 people were stupid enough to buy his bogus weight loss book that he sold through infomercials, despite the fact that he was convicted of larceny and credit card fraud over a decade before the book came out and that he has absolutely no medical training whatsoever. (The book, “The Weight Loss Plan ‘They’ Don’t Want You To Know About,” was the main complaint against Trudeau, but he also sold “remedies” for baldness, debt and addiction among other things.)
So, yes, Trudeau once stole his own mother’s social security number and told people that it was a good idea to claim that their identities had been stolen if they didn’t like their credit reports. But here are some very telling reasons why people should have never purchased the $30 diet book in the first place and why it was so obviously a scam, besides the fact that it was a product being sold in an infomercial.
Just five months after “The Weight Loss Plan ‘They’ Don’t Want You To Know About” came out, the Federal Trade Commission filed a contempt of court action against Trudeau for violating a 2004 order that he could no longer use deceptive practices to sell things. They charged him $37 million dollars for violating that order, but people kept on buying the book.
The diet that “they” (meaning the government) don’t want you to know about involves switching to an all organic diet (novel!), getting colonics, giving yourself daily injections of human chorionic gonadotropin (which are illegal in the United States) and eating just 500 calories per day, which is at least one-third of the amount you are supposed to eat daily.
Trudeau also GUARANTEED that the method was 100 percent effective. Any diet that requires you to eat basically nothing and have the everything sucked out of your colon is probably going to result in weight loss. This is not something you need a book to understand.
Also, people should have been able to tell that this diet book is crap by just looking at the cover of this thing. Look at his stupid face, the lack of credentials next to his name and the absence of any specifics about the diet. The “As Seen on TV” medallion is also code for “THIS IS B.S.”
Yes, Trudeau sounds like a terrible person, but it’s almost as if he was practically daring the FTC to come after him because of just how preposterous the crap he sold was.