Cash4gold informercial offers bribe to erase evidence of their fraud?
Cash4gold is one of those high-saturation infomercials seen by millions, right up there with Shamwow and Billy Mays. Most reasonable people who see it figure that there is some catch, probably that they don’t give credit for the entire weight of gold sent.
If you are one of those reasonable people, you were right. Rob from Cockeyed.com has some scrap gold appraised at a local pawn shop, for $180. Then he sent the package to cash4gold, who of course offered less. Much less. How does $60 sound?
So he declined their offer, and the story goes on from there.
After this story appeared on the Cockeyed.com blog, and then on Consumerist.com, the search engine listings for the search term “cash4gold” were laced with the story of the attempted rip-off.
What happens next is a demonstration of how not to improve your brand image. According to Cockeyed.com, Cash4gold and its advertising agents offer cash to the blog publisher to remove the fraud discovery article.
One of the quoted emails says
“..Your article is ranking #3 on their brand term. They would really like to make it worth your while to take it down or make it more positive….”
The entire email exchange and details can be read here.
In addition to the hush-money offer becoming public, it is likely that dozens of copycat sites will work their search engine skills to try and see if they can get their own articles to rank high, in hopes of getting a similar offer. Don’t be surprised if the entire front page of search results for cash4gold turn out to be versions of this fraud and bribe story.
This could not come at a worse time for the company, as they have just booked M.C. Hammer and Ed McMahon for a Super Bowl commercial tomorrow.
