It was 2008 or 2009 when a friend I knew from yoga invited Trish and I over to her townhouse for an ‘event.’ I knew it was some sort of sales promotion and she told me right away that I didn’t have to buy anything or have any interest in the product. She just wanted bodies there to show she was doing her part in the promotion and there would be food. That was the good part. She’s originally a Parisian and knows a lot about French cuisine. Indeed, the food was the best. The product was another matter.
It was a videophone and one of the problems was that it only worked when calling or receiving a call from someone with another ACN Videophone. The promoters were looking for people to sell them and the promise was that if you got involved on the ground floor, you could make a lot of money. But first you had to invest $495 to become a salesperson and you also had to buy some phones to sell. The idea was you get other people to join in and sell the phones for you. If you didn’t attract your own sales crew, you had to sell a lot of phones yourself to make any money. In other words, just like a pyramid scheme.
To get people excited about this product, a video was shown and guess who was promoting this phone? Donald Trump. I was well aware of who he was at the time but I’d never watched a single episode of The Apprentice so it was the first time I had heard him speaking. I was somewhat appalled that he sounded just like a carney barker. Nothing classy at all about his presentation, just a hard sell. After the video, someone stood up and said, “Wait a minute. You can already make video calls through Skype.”
The promoters who were present didn’t want to talk about that. This wasn’t through your computer. It was a videophone. I don’t think too many were impressed and the product eventually flopped. Over the years, as Trump’s balloon grew larger and larger until it dominated the entire sky, I occasionally thought about that videophone. Trump has been linked to a variety of scam over the years from Trump University to his phony foundation, but I never heard anything more about the videophone scam until just recently when Rachel Maddow put up a clip from that same Trump video promoting the phoney phone.
Maddow went on to say that in 2018, a group of people, who had been scammed and lost money, got together and filed suit. But they didn’t sue the manufacturer, ACN, instead they filed a suit against the phone’s #1 promoter, Donald Trump. Now, this summer it is finally coming to trial…one of many he faces as his bad karma starts catching up to him.
After seeing that news report, I contacted the French woman, who I haven’t talked to in several years, through Messenger and told her what I’d just seen. She said she was behind and just about to begin watching Rachel herself. About an hour later, she wrote back and said: “I didn’t know there was leprosy in Florida.” I responded: “Yeah, malaria, too.” (Both topics were also on Rachel’s show.) About the videophone, she said she didn’t get involved and didn’t even remember that Trump was the main promoter. Really?
In case anyone is interested, you can still pick up a couple of those video phones for you and your mother – or someone – for $20 each on eBay.
