Texas: Scams & Cons

Season and I were recently flipping through the channels and caught this show: The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch.

The topic was scams and cons and two of the features were from right here in Texas.

First, a company that took advantage of the rising price of gas...

BioPerformance, also know as the "Little Green Pill", a comapny started by an evangelist minister from Dallas, Texas named Lowell Sims. Apparently it was marketed as a "top secret" gasoline additive that could extend gas mileage by up to twenty-five percent or more and cut polluting emissions. The gas pill seemed to have a cult following with hundreds of wannabe millionaires singing "I'm Proud To Be An American" while waving their hands in the air and randomly shouting out "Amen"!

The thing is the pill is nothing more than mothballs dyed green and made into pill shape!

Lab results showed they’re chemical makeup to be virtually one hundred percent Naphthalene, which is what mothballs were made of years ago. BioPerformance claims right on the bottle that the little green pill is non-toxic, but Naphthalene is toxic. In fact, it’s extremely poisonous.

During the gas crisis of the 1970s, some people put mothballs in their tanks to try and save money, and it didn't work then and it doesn't work now.

What's worse is that also on the bottle in tiny print is a bizarre disclaimer: "BioPerformance, Inc. doesn't guarantee anyone any results".

For the straight unadulterated, unbiased, and purely factual scientific assessment of "the Little Green Pill" you must read this investigative report by an Orlando area TV news crew.

Recently, the Texas attorney general's office filed a suit and obtained a temporary restraining order against the company which is based in Irving, Texas. They are still under investigation.

The second story was about a woman from Fort Worth who faked having cancer for donations and sympathy. Jennifer Dibble, a thirty year old mother of five boys, told people she had terminal cancer and only had months to live.

Family, friends and others rallied to her aide. They supposedly knew nothing about the disease and, had never even known anyone with cancer. But with five boys and Jennifer’s husband working two jobs to make ends meet; they knew the family would need a lot of emotional and financial support.

They offered to care for her boys, searched the Internet for the best cancer treatments and attended and organized fundraisers and donated money.

Apparently she used the donations to take trips to Mexico, France, Las Vegas and Disney World.

Nine months later she looked better than ever. She is fit/tan and nobody understood why, especially since she was supposed to have been undergoing chemotherapy, radiation, and dialysis treatments that normally debilitate people. Weird, right?

Well, a friend's husband finally woke up to the truth and hired a private detective to check out her story. They followed her when she told people she was going for her treatments and instead of a doctor's office or hospital she was actually going to a tanning salon, a gym or the mall.

She doesn't now or ever did have cancer. Since she's been caught she still hasn't even given her family or friends an explanation for this treacherous behavior.

She might have raised as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. Seems like an "open and shut" case of fraud to me.

In stories I wondered "How could people not know it was a scam"?

What ever happened to critical thinking?

Perhaps we all want to believe in something...

The moral of the story is, some people are messd up, and will hold back nothing to mess you up too.