2010 saw the general uptake of a particularly scammy technique – the “False Scarcity” claim on a sales page.

The way it works is simple – a marketer releases a product in a big launch but swears that there are only x copies. The x is usually a small, believeable number such as 200 or 300.

The limit is placed on sales to give the launch a feeling of scarcity and prompt the potential customer to act quickly before “stocks” run out.

Of course, most of these products are digital – eBooks, videos, membership sites – so they will never technically run out of stock.

Is it fraud?

I’m not a lawyer so I wouldn’t know. It does strike me as a bit of a scummy thing to do.

These marketers are lying to their customers.

A good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) example of this in action was Matt Bacak’s “Mass Money Makers” launch on the 28th December 2010.

From Matt’s salespage:

“we’re forced to limit access to this powerful software to the next 200 lucky individuals”
“After we reach the next 200 downloads, we’ll be forced to pull the software off market”
“Thousands of people will see this page, but only the next 200 individuals will get access to this software”

To anyone reading that they would think that there are only 200 places available. However, that’s not so.

On his JV pitch page – where Matt sends potential affiliates to ask them to promote his product – he says this:

“We’re talking reaching the unreachable…2,000 Clickbank Gravity (which has never been reached before) and seeing the unseeable, 20,000 front end units (front end units, not total units) – and in turn create history”

20,000 front end units?

I’ve one question; how would you be able to sell 20,000 front end units if you are limiting the number of customers to just 200?

Very disappointing behaviour but I’ll bet now that, because it works so well, false scarcity is used more and more in 2011.

Has anyone seen Kevin Potts?

Kevin Potts, the man behind the Cambridge Business Academy and the wildly expensive “Churchill Apprentice” course, has disappeared.

His membership site has been closed down with a notice claiming it has been “sold” and his business partners (or should that be ex-business partners?) aren’t saying anything at all.

It’s a big mystery what’s happened and with Kevin keeping a very low profile he is just fuelling the speculation.

The “Churchill Apprentice” course cost £20,000 per place and if claims are to be believed around 100 people signed up.

These people were promised full access to the Cambridge Business Academy website and staff but now, a few months later, all of that appears to be gone.

A very strange way of doing business.

One of the reasons it was successful was because the website ranked very high for the term “make money online”. Surely anyone buying the site would do so to take advantage of that ranking?

By wiping all of the content from the site and leaving just a small piece of text on the front page, the site will lose that valuable search engine ranking. This does sow doubt in the mind to the claim that it has been sold.

Any information would be gratefully received, the Kevin Potts saga is turning into a big talking point going into 2011.