Dysfunctional Australia

By Author: Steven Johnson
Total Articles: 490
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It's almost impossible to run a computer without also picking up a small daily mountain of spam for erectile dysfunction drugs. Those e-mails just keep on coming. You wonder how they can ever make money for those responsible. Yet, apparently, they are very profitable. It needs replies from less than one percent of people to cover costs and show a good profit. The reason? Most of this spam is sent out using a zombie army of PCs. These bots infect machines and, without the owners being aware, send out this torrent of rubbish. Thus, the cost to the spammers is effectively zero. The PC owners pick up the bill for connection time and bandwidth. Anyone foolish enough to buy is almost pure profit. Which brings us to Australia.

For some time, it's been impossible to go anywhere in Australian cities without seeing billboards advertising, "Longer lasting sex". To enjoy this special offer, all you had to do was sign up with a company called Advanced Medical Institute (AMI). Records now presented to the court dealing with this company's administration show that the owners, Jacov "Jack" Vaisman and Brian Lonergan, spent $34 million ...
... on advertising between January 2008 and June 2009. Advertising the old-fashioned way in Australia is not cheap. But it's not simply the cost of all the ads that has sunk the company. For all the claims, the company had little or no interest in promoting the health of those who parted with their money. Most of the treatments were either ineffective or had dangerous side effects. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was just beginning a prosecution for unconscionable conduct - that's misselling and civil fraud in our racketeering sense of the word. AMI routinely gouged thousands of dollars from their patients with non-qualified medical staff giving advice and sales staff hitting credit cards for unauthorized payments. When whistleblowers tried to bring all this to the public's attention, AIM began a year-long legal campaign to gag the whistleblowers and the newspaper that was about to publish the story. By coincidence, the British subsidiary was declared bankrupt early in 2010 owning several million.

This demonstrates the extent of the market for erectile dysfunction treatments and the vast number of men apparently willing to part with their dollars for that treatment. What makes this story all the more surprising is that a business could have grown so big so quickly. With the presence of three highly effective drugs, you would think there would be no place for a cowboy outfit like AMI. Yet this company could maintain an advertising budget of $34 million over 18 months without difficulty. The only reason it failed was the extent of their fraud became too public to hide. With Cialis offering both a conventional 36-hour pill as needed and a once-daily version, it's hard to understand where all the business came from. Cialis is effective in the vast majority of cases and, even when not, Australia has a socialized medical service which offers free or subsidized care for erectile dysfunction. There was no need for these men to pay exorbitant fees for treatments that did not work.