There's a sucker born . . .

Did you know that dead ants, when ground up, will serve as an "aphrodisiac, a kidney purifier and general cure-all"? But not just any dead ants - only special ants being sold by the Yilishen Tianxi Group of China. Of course.

But here's the twist - this scam wasn't foisted off on the Woo-cure-seeking public in China. Nope, it was foisted off on ignorant farmers and former peasants as a get-rich-quick scheme. See, these suckers were sold "ant farms" and told that they would recoup a 30% on their investment in a matter of weeks. Here's the story from the LA Times (bugmenot to get around their stupid registration):

The boxes at the heart of the ant farming business are made of cardboard with a 2-inch-square plastic window and a small feeding hole framed so badly with duct tape that they look like the work of a careless teenager with a box cutter.

In return for their money, ant farmers were given the boxes, ants and a list of strict instructions: The ants need a spritz of water mixed with white sugar or honey at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. every day. They should be fed cake and egg yolks every three to five days. And they should be kept indoors.

In return, the company would come and pick up dead dried ants every 74 days. Under no circumstances were the ant farmers to open their boxes and look inside, they were told, to ensure that the special Yilishen ants weren't mixed with inferior ants.

It was evidently done as a pyramid scheme, with a total of $1.2 Billion bilked from a million wanna-be ant farmers. Of course, now the whole enterprise has collapsed, and the main culprits vanished.

This, my friends, is more than just a symptoms of the wild and wooly days of free-enterprise China. It is a perfect example of what happens when people are not taught critical thinking skills. It is a short step from dubious folk remedies to outright scams. And just one more short step from scams that take advantage of people's desperation about their health to scams that take advantage of their greed.

Jim Downey

(Via BoingBoing.)