A online ad trick I hadn’t seen before: the makers of suggestively named nutritional supplement blend “Adderin” create an ad that looks like a link to a news story … which when clicked, leads to a facsimile of a forbes.com article titled “Stephen Hawking Predicts: ‘This Pill Will Change Humanity,’” hosted at “http://forbes.com-neuroscience.tech/”
The fake article includes several photoshopped CNN screenshots, fake testimonials and endorsements from a bunch of celebrities (”Denzel Washington claims ‘the evolution of the brain’ is here”), and the assertion that Adderin will “become the biggest event in human history.”
I can’t help but think that this would be really effective if the article weren’t so obviously fake (people would just Google the product if the article was convincing). But maybe they’re doing the same thing as the spam emailers who are deliberately unconvincing to fish for especially credulous people
It’s the testimonials that always gives it away for me. Give me one or two testimonials written in laymens terms and I’d buy it (i.e. I wouldn’t immediately notice it was fake). Give me a half dozen glowing testimonials written in lovely prose and I know I’m being lied to.
