Snake oil salesman are still around

That anyone would fall for a snake oil scam today is almost unbelievable. But it’s not for nothing that conmen swear by the old axiom that “there’s a sucker born every minute”. That a Nigerian has been nabbed just last week for duping an Indian businessman from Vellore of Rs 25 lakh in a fake oil scheme shows that the trick still works 200 years after it was first used by scamsters in the US. Of course, these days, Ayurveda and herbs are the magic words to draw in credulous investors as snake oil has lost its cachet. Add to that the willingness of Indians to ‘invest’ in schemes that dupe others — only to be double-crossed and defrauded themselves, as in this case — and it is not surprising that intrepid snake oil salesmen are reprising their old cons even now, albeit with a few more twists in the tale.

Of course, metaphorical snake oil salesmen rarely peddle fake cure-alls these days; instead, all kinds of cons, from phoney real estate deals to Ponzi schemes, are sold to an ever-ready pool of gullible people. So, perhaps the Nigerian was actually being cleverly counterintuitive by selling a fake herbal oil — apparently made with honey — rather than resorting to any of the more common modern-day shakedowns. Hopefully, the human hair he used to buy with his ill-gotten money in India and export to Nigeria for a hefty profit, was real.