Thinking of buying a car? Watch out for sketchy loans!

Very interesting question about Kevin Trudeau. I’m sure others can add more, but here’s what we know. In 2004 he agreed to pay $2,000,000 to settle charges that he made false claims about a product that was supposed to cure cancer, but did not. As part of the court order, he agreed to a lifetime ban on infomercials promoting products, but he was allowed to sell books on his infomercials as much as he wanted. He never paid the any of the court fines dating back to the 2004 case, and on November 12, 2013 he was found guilty of criminal contempt for violating the 2004 agreement. The prosecution alleged that he showed at least 32,000 infomercials where he sold products after he agreed not to do that, and the 32,000 number was called “conservative”. He also never paid any of the amount he agreed, nor any fines from courts. He plans to appeal.

I can not vouch if he blew the whistle and they were out to get him. What I can say is that he is convicted of not paying fines – some of which he agreed to pay and others imposed by courts – and now he’s saying he’s broke and not able to pay at all. The courts are now in the process of seizing his second home, a luxury car, several rare possessions, all to pay off the fines, since he has not paid any of them and claims to have no money.

His track record in court is terrible, I would predict he’ll lose his appeal if it goes like any of his previous court cases. As one example (there are quite a few) he was convicted in 1991 of posing as a doctor and depositing $80,000 in false checks. The same year he also committed credit card fraud and stole Social Security Numbers, and charged up $122,735.68 on other people’s credit cards. He spent two years in prison for those convictions. It remains to be seen how he’ll come out of the current convictions and appeals.

I’ve never liked the guy, he came across as smarmy to me, but he was good at marketing his stuff and some of it I think I remember thinking was interesting over the years.

One of the quotes from the judge though mentioned that he has a track record of fraud going back to at least his 20s (that we know of). That doesn’t mean he can’t tell the truth, but it certainly doesn’t make him credible or trustworthy if you ask me. I would consider anything he said or claimed to be questionable at best.

I don’t know what he wrote about the corrupt financial system, but I do know that in terms of reporting on it, there are many, far more credible sources out there who do the same thing. Where Trudeau’s version varies with theirs, I would call those parts into question, and if I were vested in knowing whether or not there was truth to them, I would spend a lot more time validating them with my own work. That’s a very difficult and time consuming thing to do, but I’ve found myself to be wrong a few times on things like that when I sat down and analyzed the problem and actually worked out the math for myself. When you do that, you may get results that don’t always match reality, but if you check your math and it’s right, then the problem is generally that the real world is more nuanced than just straight math would suggest.

Raising the minimum wage is a pretty simple example of that. If you work out the math, it benefits the economy. If you look at the reality, sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. The math only shows that it always does, until it reaches a certain threshold (which we’ve rarely ever been close to), so there are other subtleties that have to be accounted for in debating the policy.