Tag Archives: P.T. Barnum

Have you ever wondered how all those late night infomercials that reinvent new ways of selling the same thing keep getting airtime? They wouldn’t if people weren’t buying what they were selling. Now the data is here to prove it.

The Federal Trade Commission released a survey that proved P.T. Barnum right. But maybe it was more than one fool born every day. More than 30 million adults in the U.S. – about 13 percent of the adult population – were victims of fraud during the year of the study.

Hucksters fooled the most people with, you guessed it, fraudulent weight loss products. An estimated 4.8 million U.S. consumers were victimized.