Scams on the radio

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:51:29 -0400, lglavin@mail.com said:

> Pugettians may not notice the difference.  Something tells me that
> even as a commercial outlet, KING was not beset by the many, um,
> "spurious" advertising messages heard on even generally respectable
> stations:
> "get-out-of-credit-card-debt-without-lowering-your-credit-score";
> "trade-in-your-gold-jewelry-for-cash";
> "make-as-much-money-working-from-home-as-a-fulltime-job"; etc.

I just a few hours ago returned from a vacation in Washington (D.C.,
not the state), and I was surprised to find that the scams we hear
advertised all the time on the radio here are just as prevalent there.
You would think, in the backyard of the FTC and the FDA and the
Justice Department -- a city where a randomly-chosen stranger on the
street is probably a lawyer -- that the scammers would be a bit more
cautious in placing their time buys.  (Or perhaps some of those
lawyers work for the scammers, too, telling them just how to deliver
the pitch so that the marks understand it one way and the feds
understand it another, like all that FDA-inspired nonsense about
"helps support healthy X function"[1].)

(The Washington market is huge and has horrible traffic -- an order of
magnitude worse than it is here in Boston.  This morning I was
listening to WBQB (101.5 Fredericksburg -- about an hour south of DC
when the wind is blowing the right way and the moon is full) and their
traffic reports were all about DC -- nothing local.  Meanwhile,
WTOP-FM (103.5 Washington, with numerous simulcasts) was giving
traffic advisories for I-81 in West Virginia.  And my hotel's cable
system did not carry C-SPAN!)

-GAWollman

[1] Code for "does nothing" if you're the FDA -- a glass of water
"helps support healthy X function" for all X -- but which normal
people ordinarily interpret as "good for your X" or "helps your X
condition".