BY EMMET RUSHE: Scam artists have always and will always be a thing.
As long as there is money to be made from people’s insecurities, they will always be around.
With the rise of the internet and social media, however, comes a new breed of charlatan.
This new breed is able to reach a far wider audience due to the power of internet marketing and mixing their skewered message of ‘health’ in along with motivational ‘memes’.
You may not recognise his name, but you may have shared his posts thinking that the information you were sharing was valid.
However, if you are sharing anything from the person listed below, you are sharing unsubstantiated information that is as true as an episode of Dallas is real.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you David Avocado Wolfe.
Up until last year, I had never heard of David Wolfe; take a look at him here.
However, in the last year I am greeted daily by his memes on social media.
Everyone is sharing them; old, young, rich, poor, it doesn’t matter; his memes are making their way through social media at an amazing rate.
When I first came across him last year, he had just over 1 million followers on Facebook.
He now sits at over 5 million followers.
Much of what he posts in the line of memes are motivational posts that are pretty harmless, but in between these posts are ones that are quite worrying.
David Wolfe is a self-described “health, eco, nutrition, and natural beauty expert.”
In reality, David is a con artist.
He preys on people’s trust by posting false claims and provocative memes mixed in between his motivational ones.
He is fantastic at combining a string of words together that sounds intelligible, however when you actually examine them, they’re nothing but nonsense.
He is very clever; most con artists are.
A look through his Facebook meme posts gives you an insight into his method.
He posts a string of motivational memes and then there will be one that suits his anti-science agenda.
Post like these are great for getting likes and shares on Facebook and they make up the majority of his posts.
This picture got over 27 thousand likes and over 12 thousand shares.
It builds trust with his fan base. They like his posts. It motivates them and they like and trust that what he posts is valid and valuable.
It’s great marketing.
But when you have another image, like the one below, mixed in between that has the equivalent shares and likes, questions have to be asked about the man’s integrity and morals.
There is absolutely no scientific backing to this claim that he is making.
None.
Yet it was shared and liked by his followers and believed by many as true.
The danger with posts like this is that if people who truly need the medication start believing it also, there could be serious dangers for them.
His scaremongering posts attack anything that he sees as against nature.
The things he opposes in his posts are:
- Scientists
- Doctors
- Modern education
- Pharmaceuticals
- Vaccines
- Cancer medication
- The government
The list goes on and on.
All this would be fine, if it wasn’t for the fact that David has a list of his own ‘natural’ highly priced remedies that you can buy, which will do nothing for any of your conditions, but he tells his followers that they will.
There is always an agenda with these people.
But David has built up a level of “trust” with his followers, largely based on him seeming like a “nice guy” because of his motivational posts.
So, as he gains a further level of trust with memes like this, more people will like and share his material.
One of the biggest problems with his anti-nature posts is that he doesn’t give a ‘why’ when he posts them.
He simply makes up a meme and posts it on his page.
No backing as to verify why he says this is so, or whether he has researched it to be true.
It is simply posted along with his other memes.
I found this quite amusing when I came across this meme in his posts.
It contradicts his anti-science stance as I am not sure how you research something without science.
So why is this all a problem?
After all it’s only Facebook posts, isn’t it?
The problem stems from the fact that as social media progresses, most people believe what they see on it to be true.
In America at the moment, there is a huge anti-vaccine movement happening.
This has led to America’s worst Measles epidemic in 20 years.
A Canadian couple, whose 19-month old baby died of meningitis after being treated with only home remedies, is currently on trial in Alberta.
Cancer patients are forgoing medical treatments in favour of natural remedies.
People are dying due to misinformation being spread over social media.
That is the problem with ‘nice guys’ like David ‘Avocado’ Wolfe.
He says that he is making people open their minds and think.
His followers call his critics ‘haters’ and think that if they shout in big enough numbers, their beliefs will somehow turn out to be true.
But they won’t.
David is another in a long line of history’s great snake oil salesmen.
They are good with people. They are good with words, but they are in it for themselves and to line their pockets.
The next time you see one of his non-motivational posts, just stop and think, do I really want to share this information?
If it shocked you and you felt the urge to share it, it did its job.
Just don’t give in and pass it on.
#TrainSmart
If you have any question on this article or on getting a tailored program based on your starting point, please contact me through the link below.
https://www.facebook.com/Rushe-Fitness-120518884715118/?ref=hl
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