“1 Tip for a Tiny Belly” reads the headline, rendered in what appears to be hand-lettered type and positioned above a crudely animated drawing of a woman’s bare midriff. Try as you might to concentrate on something else, the midriff distracts your eye by shrinking and reinflating — flabby to svelte, svelte to flabby.
“Cut down a bit of your belly everyday by following this 1 weird old tip,” it reads. The “weird old tip” is revealed only after you abandon what you were reading and click on the ad.
For months, versions of the ad have been just about everywhere. They have run as pop-ups and display ads on some of the most popular Web sites around, including Facebook, Weather.com and About.com. They have also shown up on the home pages of news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper in Britain.
The ad is so broadly distributed that it’s likely you’ve seen it not just once or twice but hundreds of times. The accumulated number of “impressions” — the number of times it has flashed by someone on the Internet over the past 18 months— runs into “the tens of billions,” estimates Steve Wernikoff, a government lawyer who has tracked it. “It’s just a tremendous amount.”
The innocent-seeming “1 Tip” ad is actually the tip of something much larger: a vast array of diet and weight-loss companies hawking everything from pills made from African mangoes to potions made from exotic acai berries. Federal officials have alleged that the companies behind the ads make inflated claims about their products and use deceptive means to market them.
If this is the ad I'm thinking of, it's so obviously a scam. I was shocked when I saw the ad everywhere. I am not shocked that some people fell for it.
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