Start a home business, get rich quick, win financial freedom! If you watch late-night TV, you've heard it all before. But what's the story behind these slick pitchmen and their dubious schemes? Enter The Salty Droid, your ornery metal guide to the corrupt underworld of scam-marketing scum. This charmingly acerbic bot (owned and operated by mild-mannered Chicago dog-lover Jason Michael Jones [inter-view, long talk + transcript]) is a valiant crusader against the vile con-men who bankrupt the elderly and the desperate with beautiful lies. Exposed so far: A shadowy "Syndicate" of frauduct-pushing personality cults polluting the media with blogspam and woo-woo talking points. Boiler rooms in the Utah desert where telemarketers farm credit from easy targets with cunning, probing scripts [PDF]. Powerful politicians bought wholesale. Believers left to die in fraudulent new-age vision quests. It's a soul-crushing beat, enough to make one feel like a regular catcher-bot in the digital rye. But somebody's got to do it -- preferably someone with plasma nunchucks and titanium skin.
posted by Rhaomi on Aug 31, 2011 - 47 comments

A former witch-doctor who now campaigns to end child sacrifice confessed for the first time to having murdered about 70 people, including his own son. Human sacrifice is on the increase in Uganda, and according to the head of the country's Anti-Human Sacrifice Taskforce the crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity, and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly. Uganda's Minister of Ethics and Integrity James Nsaba Buturo believes that "to punish retrospectively would cause a problem... if we can persuade Ugandans to change, that is much better than going back into the past." [more inside]
posted by VikingSword on Jan 7, 2010 - 91 comments

I wear your shirt - The trifecta for Silly Saturday single link posts. [more inside]
posted by bjork24 on Jan 17, 2009 - 37 comments

Here's an odd unforeseen consequence of the Columbian drug trade: fishermen along Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast have been been getting rich off of "white lobster"—cocaine dumped overboard by Columbian drug traffickers that, through a fortuitous arrangement of sea currents, washes ashore. [more inside]
posted by Weebot on Oct 31, 2007 - 17 comments

Write letters to your unsaved friends. When the rapture comes, this guy will mail them.
posted by Sfving on Dec 26, 2006 - 80 comments

I am facing forclosure A 24-year-old kid who leveraged eight houses in a dropping market with no-down loans from television get-rich-quick seminars is now $2.2 million in debt. Thanks, Donald Trump, you twat.
posted by parmanparman on Oct 6, 2006 - 118 comments

Photo-Blocker - For those who are tired of obeying basic traffic laws. (via)
posted by buriednexttoyou on Dec 6, 2004 - 29 comments