WASHINGTON — It might be the ad that ate the Internet.
“1 Tip for a Tiny Belly” reads the headline, rendered in fake 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 flat, flat to flabby.
“Cut down a bit of your belly everyday by following this 1 weird old tip,” it reads.
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 websites, including Facebook, and . They also have shown up on the home pages of news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and The Washington Post.
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.
The take so far: at least $1 billion and counting.
The “1 Tip” ads are the work of armies of “affiliates,” independent promoters who place them on behalf of small diet-product sellers with names such as HCG Ultra Lean Plus. The promoters profit each time someone clicks through to the product-seller’s site and orders a free sample. The sample, however, isn’t always so free.
In lawsuits filed over the past year, the Federal Trade Commission has alleged that the ads are the leading edge of what amounts to a three-step scheme that has conned millions of people.
People who click on the ad are directed to a second site, which looks like a diet or health-news page. Almost everything about these would-be news sites is bogus, the federal government contends. It has said that the offer of free or low-cost samples is a scheme to capture consumers’ credit-card numbers, leading to thousands of complaints about unauthorized charges.
The promoters use the same formula, and sometimes the exact same ad, “because it’s cheap,” said David O’Toole, an FTC lawyer who has been involved in the agency’s crackdown. “They don’t have to create a new ad from whole cloth. It’s easy to use it again and again because it keeps costs down. And it works.”
