The Propaganda Playbook: AI Fraud (He Made $1.8 Billion With 800 Fake Doctors) - #Marketing - Ep. 126

About this episode

This episode explores a $1.8 billion AI fraud involving fake doctors and the manipulation of marketing techniques.

There’s a moment when the future shows up and the people writing about it forget to check who’s actually building it. The New York Times just profiled a guy who built a $1.8 billion company from a house in LA with two employees and a stack of AI tools. The internet lost its mind. Sam Altman said he wanted to meet him. Inc. ran a glowing follow-up. There was just one problem - the entire customer-acquisition machine was built on more than 800 AI-generated fake doctors selling real weight-loss drugs to real people on Facebook, and the FDA had already sent a warning letter six weeks before the article ran. In this episode, I walk you through what’s actually happening underneath the headlines - fake doctors with profiles claiming to be from Kiev with interests in Bronze Age archaeology, AI-generated before-and-after photos so sloppy that one “patient” has her fingers melted into her phone, FDA warning letters the Times never mentioned, and 1.6 million patient records exposed in a data breach at the clinical partner. Then I trace it back 100 years to Edward Bernays, who invented this exact technique - “manufactured third-party authority” - by getting real doctors to endorse cigarettes…

People in this episode

Host: Russell Brunson

Topics covered

• AI fraud
• customer acquisition
• fake doctors
• data breach
• marketing manipulation

Keywords

• AI tools
• weight-loss drugs
• FDA warning
• data breach
• marketing psychology

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: New York Times, Inc.

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