Glenn Beck's Favorite Gold Company Forced to Refund $4.5 Million to Customers

[swag]

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/02/glenn-beck-gold-compay-forced-refund-45-million-defrauded-customers

—By Stephanie Mencimer Thu Feb. 23, 2012

Glenn Beck shilling for Goldline in 2010. As Glenn Beck goes, so goes his favorite gold company. For years, the Santa Monica-based precious metals company, Goldline International, has helped keep the conservative talk show host on the air by sponsoring his radio show and now-defunct Fox News show. Goldline stuck with Beck even after most of his other advertisers fled in light of the host's increasingly inflammatory rhetoric. Beck, for his part, lavishly praised the company, telling listeners and viewers that he personally bought gold from the company and calling its executives "people I trust."

Those were the golden days. Since Beck's Fox News heyday, his fortunes and Goldline's have fallen sharply. Beck parted ways with Fox in June, and in November prosecutors in Santa Monica charged six of Goldline's executives with fraud and accused the company of running a bait-and-switch operation that lured customers into buying overpriced antique coins as investments—coins that Beck promoted on his shows. Mother Jones documented this scam in a 2010 story about the company and its relationship with Beck. The former New York congressman Anthony Weiner helped bring national attention to the company's business practices. Beck went on the defensive, attacking Weiner and defending his favorite gold dealer.

On Wednesday, the Santa Monica city attorney obtained a judgment and injunction against Goldline that requires the company to radically overhaul its practices and to stop deceiving customers about prices, among other things. The company must refund up to $4.5 million to defrauded customers, and pay $800,000 into a fund for future claims. The judgment also requires the company to give up one of the staples of its marketing tactics, and one that was hyped routinely by Beck: the idea that the government's coming for your gold. For years Beck and Goldline insisted customers should buy its "numismatic" (or antique) coins rather than standard government-issued bullion because, they claimed, in 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt had ordered the government to confiscate private citizens' gold bullion; antique coins were spared from the seizure. The claim was a huge stretch, as was the notion Beck perpetuated that Obama was plotting to seize Americans' gold. Now, Goldline has to quit talking about bullion confiscation lest it face further trouble from prosecutors.

To make sure that the company abides by the injunction, Goldline has to pay the cost of hiring a former federal prosecutor to monitor its operation. The monitor will have full access to company records and will perform undercover test calls to ensure that the myth of the 1933 gold confiscation has been banished from Goldline's sales pitch.

[NAO]

1. those receiving a refund must be angry about government regulations...

and crying for "tort reform".

[CAPHAVOC]

2. What a Scam!

Duping the Dopes is easy.

[NAO]

3. market forces should have decided what happened

like those people who bought from Goldline should just not buy from Goldline and it would go out of business and other honest companies would crop up to meet the doomsday prepping gold needs market.

Isn't that basic to how market economies function without government interference?