Have you ever heard a sales pitch like this?

Work from home! Get rich quick! Imagine how nice it would be to only have to work an hour a day online and watch the money roll in! Just buy this e-book that I claim is worth $50.00 for the rock bottom price of just $19.95! Hurry, this offer is only good for the next 30 seconds…so whip out your credit card NOW! 29…28…27…

Can you believe people fall for that?

There are thousands if not millions of these sites out there trying to sell you what they claim is the best information manual on how to make money online…but most of them are just using “the greater fool” theory.

What is “the greater fool” theory?

Well, they say that every fool thinks he’s smarter than the next guy. Thus, there’s always a greater fool. The gimmick is to hit you with a sales page that is full of rhetoric, inflated truths, fake testimonials, and a nice push for the sale at the end. Once you buy their way to make millions online, it turns out to be an ebook that usually says something like, “Hey, you bought this…but you’re smarter than everybody else, right?

Here’s how to make your money:
1. Write an ebook (or copy this one)
2. make a sales page that promises to show someone how to make huge amounts of money online
3. get a PayPal account
4. pay for some PPC advertising
5. watch more idiots pay you for the same worthless crap you just bought from me!

And don’t forget to link to my website!”

Does this remind anyone else of an old joke?

Q: How do you keep in idiot in suspense?
A: I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have known very successful business professionals that complain to me on a regular basis that they keep buying these things and they never make any money. We’re not talking about high school or college kids here. We’re talking about mid thirties and forties mid-level executives with college degrees and even post-graduate degrees. To make the whole thing worse, they didn’t just buy one or two and figure it out. They’ve bought ten or twenty and are still ready to buy more!

Come on, people. That’s just stupid.

I was reading about carnival games once and how they were “rigged” and what techniques could be used to raise my odds of winning. One of the chapters was about famous rip-offs. Here’s my favorite:

Carnival salesman would set up a tent with a sign out front that said “CAUTION: Man Eating Chicken Inside!”. None of the customers could see through the tent at what was really inside, but you could hear growling, scratching, and other strange noises coming from inside the tent. Once a crowd gathered, the salesman would collect a dollar from everyone and open the tent to reveal a man sitting down at a table eating chicken. The people would see that the growling and scratching came from a dog or another animal they were playing with inside the tent for the noise effect. The salesman would laugh and say, “Well, here’s your MAN EATING CHICKEN!” The crowd would of course be upset and want their money back. The really good salesmen would stand and say, “Look folks, it’s just a joke. If you fell for it, then your friends certainly will too. You’re obviously smarter than they are and you’ll be in on the joke this time.”

It worked. Most of them would leave and tell their friends this amazing story about a “man eating chicken” they saw at the carnival and inevitably these friends would show up, pay their money, fall for the same thing, then go tell their friends about it.

Don’t believe me? It’s a pretty common joke in carnivals today…just not as much as it was in the early days of carnivals. Take a look…

Sometimes you have to determine the difference between being “in” on the scam, “part” of the scam, or “running” the scam.The best choice, in my opinion, is to avoid scams all together. Especially versions of “the greater fool” scam that seem to pop up almost everywhere.At the VERY least…just learn to recognize when you’re getting scammed.- John