The 10 Biggest Scams ever Broadcast on TV 

Yep true :) I cut a crapload out of James Hydrick due to both some of it being distasteful and I felt there wouldn't be much interest from viewers hearing the detail. Honestly it mostly just made me want to talk about James Randi's career debunking psychics and I felt there wasn't much artistic or educational value in me discussing Hydrick's criminal behaviour and future. So I kept it very very short :) Thanks for the extra info!

Celebrities be like “CHILDREN!!!!”

@@AccurateThings fr especially back in the 70s & 80s

@@andykishoresothertvstuff5759 it’s trafficker dumbass

Institutionalized? As in Not in prison? Yep. Sounds like California alright.

Nah that caught me so off guard lmao

@@abbygamepop Bruh same lmfao XD

​@@bgaming2297yeah back then Strider I believe used to make more r rated jokes but now he really doesent so it's actually surprising

Lol

It the less offensive R rated joke I seen

Yup. I can see dropping a few $ now and then, but never the $50-100 some people do. I never play, but occasionally when one of the mega lottos reaches $1billion or so I have dropped maybe $8-10.

The lottery industry profits off of addiction. That's how they make so much money.

I remember when a store clerk said that they were going to be throwing away food bagged it twice dude spent his entire paycheck on lotto numbers he was luckily living in a apartment complex that was cheapest place to live in my home town and it being a small town were everyone knows everyone for the most part so he wasn't going to starve

One of the places where I used to work didn't give us Christmas bonus's. Instead, he gave us lottery tickets in Christmas cards. Needless to say, I was personally insulted.

One of my best friends and former coworkers used to spend hundreds of dollars a day on these tickets. She was a very underprivileged person, on a fixed income, living in government housing, with multiple children, and living off EBT. She'd waste so much of her checks on these tickets and spend up to an hour buying and paying out random tickets. It honestly made me really sad to see someone so desperate to do that.

XD that's a hilarious way to know for certain if a psychic was a scammer

@@sammitaylor3942 😁😁

Guess that must have been before the days of caller ID..lol!

What would you have done if she said your name, address and more? 😅

This. The other station was WGN, and the signal for them lasted about a few seconds before they went to a back-up transmitter. The sportscaster said something along the lines of "Well, if you're wondering what happened, so am I." There was a post on reddit from someone who was supposedly in the group of people who did the hijacking or was the sibling of the person who was Max Headroom. It does provide some plausible points for why and how it happened, but take it with a grain of salt

@@pierrecusmybladdersempty1938 Oddity Archive.

@@pierrecusmybladdersempty1938 i actually thought it was WGN themselves. Since they’re the types to do that? I live in lake county Illinois… and I’ve watched em my entire life, they’ve got to be the most unprofessional bunch of news casters well not unprofessional, more careless and just normal people. But for some reason the line up of them reminds me of the number 2 station from anchor man. They’re all just super schemy looking to me and I love it.

Max headroom, sounds like it should be combined with max legroom.

It was the greatest and funniest hijacking in American TV history.

That sickness means you have more humanity than most. Great job! Keep it up and happy holidays to you.

⁠@@dolphincrescent54thank you very much. Happy holidays to you too :)

Same

I hope all three of y’all have a very merry Christmas.

⁠@@Megajaybreaker4thanks! I hope you have a Merry Christmas too!

One that stuck out to me was from an old Nostalgia Critic commercial special that didn’t even look like it was trying. Just a badly made red puppet thing.

Four words, for the risqué ones: *_Pick Up The Phone!!_*

A lot of those were targeted at kids too. To trick them into calling with or without their parents knowing.

Also Ja Rule 10 minutes after festival opening on twitter: I AM NOT GUILTY and IT WAS *NOT* A SCAM

Yea the times i had to tell my Mom and Friends that Trash TV isnt actually real... its insane. I am from Switzerland and we get a lot of, we call it "Assi TV" - "Asocial TV", it usually shows completely fake Families in Germany that act highly trashy, don't work, who act just like 100% human garbage. And you would be shocked, at how many people use this, to "verify" their own shitty life, to "not be as bad as theirs" It feels real, because they don't use real actors. Just people who want to be on Television. So many people believe that these people "really are like that".

Not all heroes wear capes 💪

Some reality shows are more real than others.

I've genuinely met people who believe I'm a Celebrity is filmed in a forest where the contestants have to survive starvation... Like dude no, it's clearly a set in some studio and they're obviously fed between sessions, it wouldn't even be legal to starve them.

@@Kamifox1 I remember one guy actually got really hurt he messed up his leg and his wound actually became infected and they had to take him off the show there was another guy that got an appendicitis and there was another guy that actually got heat stroke That was on the Survivor Series now I don't know if any of the environments were real but the injuries were real

You spoke nothing but facts. And happy holidays!

Happy holidays to you too Dolphin :) I really like roast turkey this time of year! 🍗 Delish

You know,i got scammed a lot out of pokemon cards from 7-10 years old,so i understand completely

Exactly @NateB_cu8wy

​@@phantomstrider I'm more of a ham person for Christmas.

Yeah, it's mostly just FB etc. scams now...

The napealin one made me laugh

Some girl I know thinks her cat used to be Ethel Merman.

😂@@josephrowe849

*_REINCARNATION_*

I'd like to think if reincarnation was real, we'd move UP the foodchain, not down it. 😒

Lol, I thought Vegas residents would be more adverse to buying lottery tickets but man, the number of people I know that regularly take an afternoon to drive to Primm is shocking! I guess it's more understandable they tend to only buy in once the jackpot gets relatively high, though. And I guess my balance was better than I thought because I never had the rolling ankle problem or bad knees afterwards. I miss those shoes so much; nothing since has offered the comfort of Shape Ups.

@@sujimtangerines my mom also really liked how those shoes felt

We have a fast and soft-spoken bit at the end for ours about "gambling responsibly" and the exact chances of winning.

Yup....statistics tell us that your almost as likely to win without ever buying tickets

Now, the NFL does the same thing for gambling, then at the end They say don’t over spend Your money. Gambling is a scam and an addiction, that You just can’t say no to. It really made Me feel sick, when the NFL participated with it.

That is just brokie cope. the lottery is still a valid investment.

I understood it more as "If the doctor is a nerd, then being a nerd is fantastic!"

Reddit ass comment

Allegedly part of the Eminem rap God music video is inspired by the max headroom incident

ALL OF BRITAIN HATES HIM AT THIS POINT

Rassilon would like a word with him.

Out of any attempt to recreate the max headroom hijack Nintendo win

PCH is one of the worst scams perpetrated upon the American public, right behind party politics. They say "no purchase needed to qualify", but if you don't buy their overpriced rags, you will NEVER be allowed to 'qualify'. They just keep throwing pages of magazine ads at you, saying "just one more step to qualify!" Yeah, total scamfest. 😡

"That's what I used to think!" said the paid actor in the TV ads. No doubt his paycheck for the spot was all the money he ever got from them.

Yeah I think Josh was really stretching on that one, it's not so much that you're unlikely to win the lottery, you'll probably win small or moderate amounts of money if you play enough, it's the winning millions things that's unlikely and I personally don't see anything wrong with buying the occasional ticket, it's better then wasting money on booze and tobacco that's for sure, at least lottery tickets won't slowly kill you.

@@jadedheartsz If I could trade out my addiction of Fast Food with an addiction to the Lottery, I would.

@@jadedheartsz If you get satisfaction out of buying tickets that argument is sound. If you buy the tickets to actually win a good amount of money the argument is not there. I at least get positive brain chemicals when I drink or smoke.

@@salamantics Yeah i do get satisfaction out of it, but even if I don't win at least's no risk of cancer from playing the lottery(or chance of getting a DUI and losing your license like my dad did from drinking).

Pay £2 for scratch card wins £2, buys another scratch card and wins nothing

If I remember right, they do let the winners wear a mask. They just want to record a person actually signing the paperwork foe proof people can win, you hiding your face doesn't bother them.

@@angrytheclown801 Don't they still publish the names, though? Besides, that's a silly justification: "We want people to know it's *possible* to win." OFC we know it's *POSSIBLE*, you loony lotto loofahs, just like it's also possible to be struck by a meteor on a Sunday during a solar eclipse on a Leap Year! It's just the likelihood is so astronomically small the odds may as well be non-existent! The random-number-generator is...well...just that: random! I'll much rather take my chances with rare loot drops from map metas in Guild Wars 2: at least then, if I don't get what I want, the only thing I've lost is time...and patience...and maybe a little dignity... XD

@@bluestreaker9242 I'm not sure about publishing your names, but I worked in the gambling industry. It's not that silly a justification. Think about it: You know people win at casinos, someone just won a jackpot while I'm typing this. But neither of us want to go to the casino and blow a paycheck. Most people would agree to this. But there's just something about seeing someone win that gets people hooked. No one became a gambling addict by just being told they could win a fortune but probably not, they have to experience that win if at least vicariously.

I remember my aunt trying to buy some of his cancer cures iirc for her father. Ofc it didn't work. He graveyard dead. No disprespect, Papa I miss you.

It’s really sad that he did what he did. My friend and I did his diet that came out before the cure book. Both of us did very well and a Dr in my town and her brother followed the original dr’s plan for it and did so well she was helping patients with it. When it first started the injections of the hCG were illegal in the states. About a year or two they were legalized and GNC and many other places sold the synthetic form. I have an extreme needle phobia so I did the synthetic form and she did the injections. Only diet program that truly helped me loose weight. Also it was the easiest for me to follow, probably because it said you can eat this, this and this and nothing else. There are many recipes on Pinterest that are the hCG diet friendly. I actually have been pondering going back on it as I have had some health issues and have put on a good bit since. If he had of stopped there and not gotten greedy. Sadly some just can’t.

You solve that problem by just buying one ticket occasionally and not a ton at once. I much prefer buying scratch-off tickets as that way you don't have to wait for the numbers to be announced and you're more likely to win those.

It's gambling on a larger level. But people don't acknowledge it.

My neighbour 3 doors down won £3m years ago. I guess thats all the luck in the street used up now.

i saw people win small amounts on tickets but never more than $100 on a single ticket

Sad thing is, though, it's usually disabled and elderly doing it. So it's usually for healthcare costs and medical debt/treatment/medication.

Thank you from a fellow Canadian!

Oh, he knew how to pronounce it, he just did not want to say it lol

Kids are far more resilient and knowledgeable than their parents expect. They pick up on a lot. When my parents sat young me and my sister down to explain how Santa wasn't real and how "the birds & bees" worked, we admitted we knew all that. Every kid in early elementary school knew. 😅

@@lancerevell5979 When I was in fourth grade, we had to watch a video about periods to explain what they were, it was during school, and the video also mentioned "by the way periods happen because this is how babies are made." And they even showed digital art of it. They don't bring it up again, and just move onto what a period is and why it happens, but all of us learned "the birds and the bees" that day just from that one scene.

I only knew about the birds and the bees 🐝 in the 5th grade which is strange

Miss Cleo told me, a 13 year old girl at the time, that my husband was finally getting out of jail. I didn’t even ask a question first just said good day lol.

If I remember right there was an episode of that's so raven about a similar thing

Cleo is not a good person. She committed the grave sin of lying and scamming, all of which are sins that God is no longer forgiving as of 2020. If she had died later, she would most certainly be tormented by the demons lurking in the fiery pits of Hell. I refuse to show compassion to people like her. And it saddens me to know that you guys still show kindness to people like her.

​@@nevaehhamilton3493 I never said that she was a good person, just that she was fun to watch when I was a kid

@@stlouisrocker100 your youth of the past are just as intellectually inept as ours of the present day.

Think less about baseball.

It turned out that 2 stations were hijacked. WGN and WTTW.

I would have started a company handing them out for free and advertising it to women for videos.

South Park did an episode based upon the Shake Weight. It made me feel better knowing I wasn't the only one who thought it looked inappropriate. That episode was pretty funny.

I used to think Sketchers were for old people until...My father passed away and he had just bought a pair a few weeks earlier. So my mom gave them to me , I put them on one day and I was like "Damn these shoes are so comfortable". So now I wear Sketchers and have several pairs, I love the slip in ones. Plus every few months the Sketcher store has a buy one get a second pair for half price. i usually get two pair for about $60, beats the hell out of spending $75-$100+ for one pair of Nikes.

It was a horrible scam. Netflix has a great documentary on it

@@tiffanyeyoung1800 Just out of curiosity, do you know the name of the documentary so I can search it on Netflix?

All of his videos are my favorite. I like his TV show reviews the most :3

Sorry to be that guy, but *made

@@samariathemaniacsamee :D

What a simp

@@nicosfangsalso, your profile picture looks adorable

Kinda sad that because someone nefarious aligns with your ideals just makes everything hunky-dorey. Ya'll need to start living as critical-thinking individuals.

@@mr.voidout4739 Never said that. Just giving credit where credit is due. That doesn't necessarily mean I agree with every single thing she said/did. Although I will say, from the info given in the video, it sounded to me like she might not have been treated well by the people actually in charge. I wouldn't be surprised if she simply played a character and wasn't afforded the decision to warn viewers that it was only that- a character. Like all those ""psychic"" people shows/call lines etc should have been doing and still do in the first place. Again, nowhere am I saying that I agree with the scam or absolutely everything about her. Because I don't.

It's all right in the end since she suddenly found a way to be excused of scamming people by having a mental illness.

I REMEMBER SYLVIA BROWN! She got completely destroyed on Montel Williams IIRC.

A scammer is a scum period

From the US here and we have those ads as well.

Oh lord, did some Australia states legalize sports betting recently too? Just happened in the US. It was really bad this spring and summer. Soooo many ads. Hasn't completely been legalized in the country but I think 25 or so states just passed legislation about it. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Indiana are a few at the top of my head. And they brought out a bunch of celebrities to hawk these services.

@@SheilaDeBonis At least in your country they don't have pokies in restaurants like AppleBees and inside of pubs because in AUS there is a lot of space in the pubs that caters to slots. Also in the USA you have to be 21 to gamble which is weird but that means that less young people would waste their money while in AUS you can gamble at 18. The gambling industry doesn't have as much grip on your politicians like they do here but it still a bad thing because your politicians don't want to outlaw gambling in children games like FC 24 or Fornite because their are being paid off by the companies. There are a lot of people playing EA sports games here on RU-vid and are winning meaning that there is a likely chance that those guys and gals are plants paid by EA to glorify gambling. Those games also have no age verification meaning there is nothing stopping kids from using their parents money to gamble on players in the ultimate team or skins in Fortnite. The FC/ FIFA, NBA 2k and Madden series are all rated E in your country even though you can spend real money on players and skins that you can't buy directly and instead you have to put money in a slot and hope that you get the item that you wanted which is gambling and yet it rated E and not AO. Same thing in AUS because most sports games are either G or PG meaning that there is no restriction on who can play it and the only thing that the advisory board said about gambling is that the game got in game purchases which is more than the ESRB does where they don't even mention that because the ESRB is compromised because the ESRB board is made up of the leaders of video game companies who are the ones who put gambling inside of full price games Fornite is M here and T over in USA but my point still stands because M is not a restricted rating like MA15 or R18 and anyone can still play it while in USA T for teen is 13+ but in USA you have to be 21 to gamble.

​@@Ensign_gamesWE DO??? I cut the cable cord maybe 5-6 years ago so it must be a more recent development?

yeah it became a more recent development@@sujimtangerines

in what way is this even a scam actually

@@hokton8555 it wasn't, he says in the video that he was breaking the rules because he wanted to talk about it

Robocop made that joke decades ago.

Actually in New York the lottery is controlled by the state and the money goes to education, actually in 2022-2023 the lottery contributed $3.7 billion dollars to the states education system. From what I understand in the United States, lotteries are controlled by the states they are in, not a private company and not all states have the lottery.

The flip side is if you DO win the lottery its a huge life change and not usually for the better. There are plenty of videos on here about what happens to people and its very sad

That's because the island didn't actually belong to him, just an associate of his

What the hell is it about people completely buying conspiracy theory BS!?

Sadly his diet book did work and was from a Swiss (but I can’t really remember for sure) Dr who had a weight loos clinic. A Dr in my town was also helping her patients with it as she and her brother had very good results from it. The hormone injections had been illegal in the states till maybe a year after his book came out. Sadly I guess he become greedy and used his good fortune of having something that worked and turned into a scam artist. Had he have stopped there his life and others would have benefited from it.

It's kinda funny, those are basically the shoes we had to wear for marching band back in the 90s lol

I also have a comment on the Fyre thing: "I suppose you could say, it was _a dumpster Fyre!_ " [Canned laughter]

Exactly! My marching band bought special shoes for us to wear, so we could get our toes high & really roll our steps. (Mid 90s basically.) I betcha that is where Skechers got the idea from, too.

You're thinking of Justin Trudeau

It was intentionally a scam, The creator was a con artist already

You've probably never heard of Oddity Archive, but its Host Ben Minnotte covered the Hijack in Depth on his Channel 11 years ago.