R.I.P. Don Lapre

Do you want to make money, a lot of money, through tiny ads in newspapers? I can't believe that Don Lapre is dead! Someone with the passion to make money, develop an intricate system and sell it back to us, and make money off of our dreams to become successful, as opposed to the hard work that he claimed he did in those infomercials, should not be dead! Supposedly he committed suicide in jail while awaiting trail, but we really do not know for sure.

Making Money Show with Don Lapre was a staple if you were up at 2 am. watching infomercials. "Take that one tiny classified ad", make a lot of money! I really loved those commercials.

Don Lapre was selling snake oil on independent television stations early in the morning, and I loved it. The nineties were the absolute best time for infomercials; you had Dionne Warwick and her Psychic Friends Network, the SMC commercials, any number of hustlers came on over the airwaves and tried to tell you that you could make money without exploiting the next guy. The infomercials were cheap entertainment for those of us that did not have cable.

Don Lapre may have been a little too convincing though. He took his hustle online through fake websites that often ended up here. The site is nothing but a bunch of random pictures of him living the good life. In his "disclaimer" he suggests that the majority of the people, even though they made $1,000, did not have the resolve to make a lot of money. It is a sad testimony to how this young kid, who had lengthy infomercials in the nineties, took his passion to debunking his haters, and pundits that spoke out against the product he was trying to sell, instead of convincing us that the American dream was within reach.

When a man with the sophistication to hustle local newspapers ends up with a single page website that prints an email address, but does not link to it (as though whomever developed that site knows absolutely nothing about HTML) you know that the gig is up, and the empire has collapsed. In any event he may have encouraged someone else to become successful; even if they did pay him $295 in order to experience the privilege of reading the blueprint to success.