Sunday, August 27, 2006

9/11: It's Scamtastic!

Of all the commercials I hate, there is one ad I truly detest. It's the one touting a 9/11 commemorative coin that allegedly uses actual silver taken out of a bank vault from Ground Zero to create a flip-up WTC. "Watch as the Twin Towers rise again like a Silver-Plated Double Cock of Revenge!"

The shameless piles of shit hawking this crass, tacky hunk o' tin is The National Collector's Mint, a company that's already been sued for fraud by the New York Attorney General for a Freedom Tower coin scam that also claimed to be made with silver taken from Ground Zero. Turns out the coins were not pure silver, but a cheap metal alloy lightly plated with about a penny's worth of silver. National Collector's Mint was forced to pay back more than $2 million to consumers taken in by the scam.

Despite the lawsuit and ruling, the company is STILL selling those bogus Freedom Tower coins on their website.

The Director of National Collector's Mint is retired GOP Congressman, Barry Goldwater Jr., Republican activist and son of the late Barry Goldwater Sr., the 5-term Republican senator from Arizona and 1964 GOP presidential candidate and man credited with the revival of the Conservative Movement in the US.

Which leads me to two big questions:
1. How much of the profits from these worthless coins -- if any -- is being transfered to the GOP?

2. If the silver is, as the company claims on TV and on its website, actual silver taken from a bank vault from Ground Zero, then why hasn't this company had criminal charges brought against it? Unless the silver was their property to begin with, then isn't SOMEBODY guilty of bank robbery?

Sorry for the length of this post, but that damned commercial just throws me into a Universe of Pissed-Off that'd scare the brown outta Satan himself.