Via NBC News, a report on a long-running scam that took off thanks to the Internet:
The social media posts started in May: photos and videos of smiling people, mostly women, drinking Mason jars of black liquid, slathering black paste on their faces and feet, or dipping babies and dogs in tubs of the black water. They tagged the posts #BOO and linked to a website that sold a product called Black Oxygen Organics.
Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. The website of the Canadian company that sold it billed it as “the end product and smallest particle of the decomposition of ancient, organic matter.”
Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. “A gift from the Ground,” it reads. “Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.”
...The businessman behind Black Oxygen Organics has been selling mud in various forms for 25 years now, but BOO sold in amounts that surprised even its own executives, according to videos of company meetings viewed by NBC News.
The stars appeared aligned for it. A pandemic marked by unprecedented and politicized misinformation has spurred a revival in wonder cures. Well-connected Facebook groups of alternative health seekers and vaccine skeptics provided an audience and eager customer base for a new kind of medicine show. And the too-good-to-be-true testimonials posted to social media attracted a wave of direct sellers, many of them women dipping their toes into the often unprofitable world of multilevel marketing for the first time.
If you’ve been following the anti-vaxx chronicles, a recurring element is the number of alternative ‘treatments’ and ‘cures’ for Covid that are being embraced by people for...reasons.
While BOO was around long before Covid appeared, it got swept up by the search for anything that could be used to ‘in your face!’ actual experts, the government, the libs, etc. while also confirming paranoid conspiracy theories about ‘real’ cures. Add multilevel marketing (MLM) to the mix, crank up social media, and look out!
The story credits BOO WOO activists for engaging on social media to take down magic dirt — but the real story seems to be US and Canadian government agencies finally stepping in to shut this down. (Once their attention was gotten.) There was good reason to do so, and not just because of health concerns over what was in the dirt. As the NBC report notes:
Participation in MLMs boomed during the pandemic with 7.7 million Americans working for one in 2020, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Direct Selling Association, the trade and lobbying group for the MLM industry. Wellness products make up the majority of MLM products, and, as the Federal Trade Commission noted, some direct sellers took advantage of a rush toward so-called natural remedies during the pandemic to boost sales.
More than 99 percent of MLM sellers lose money, according to the Consumer Awareness Institute, an industry watchdog group. But according to social media posts, BOO’s business was booming. In selfies and videos posted to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, women lather BOO on their faces and soak their feet in sludge-filled pasta pots while, they claim, the money rolls in.
emphasis added
Now?
...According to BOO President Carlo Garibaldi, they had weathered the FTC complaints, the FDA seizures, the Health Canada recalls and the online mob. But the “fatal blow” came when their online merchant dropped them as clients.
With no actual product in stock for the last two months, sellers had been urging customers to “preorder” BOO. Now, the throng of customers responding to the nonconsumable “reformulation” by asking for their money back had spooked their payment processor.
...In a separate Zoom meeting unattended by executives and shared with NBC News, lower-rung sellers grappled with the sudden closure and the reality that they were out hundreds or thousands of dollars.
“I am three weeks to a month away from having a baby and I’ve been depending on this money to arrive in my bank account,” one seller said through tears. “It’s the only income we have.”
The future of BOO is uncertain. Tens of thousands of bags remain in warehouses, according to Black Oxygen executives. Sellers are unlikely to receive orders, refunds or commissions. The federal lawsuit will continue, Matt Wetherington, the Georgia lawyer behind the proposed class action lawsuit, said.
One of the sadder elements of this is the number of people who not only thought they’d found something good, they were hoping to make money from doing good by selling this stuff to friends and family. Many of them are still desperately looking for a way to go on.
One of the more infuriating things is those who knew this was a scam, but persisted in perpetrating it for profit. The parallels with the anti-vaxx movement are obvious. It’s the kind of thing that has deep roots in the conservative fever swamp, as this sadly still relevant 2012 work by Rick Perlstein documents in The Long Con.
Belief and hope are essential tools for humans to deal with the world — but they can be weaponized for bad ends. If people are turning to magic dirt, in part it’s because of a decades-long campaign by conservatives to discredit reality. (Remember this?)
They’ve attacked science, they’ve attacked education, they’ve attacked government, they’ve promoted Faith over facts, all to keep pushing ideas that have not worked, do not work, and will never work — but their income and power depends on them being believed and acted on. Inciting fear, uncertainty, and doubt makes their base susceptible to arrant nonsense, and making them angry further clouds their judgement. (The business model of Fox ‘News’ in other words.)
It’s one reason why the former guy is still out there, huckstering away. Because it works.
