Gambling in Casablanca?

You'd better sit down for this one.

It turns out that Enzyte, the natural male enhancement formula, doesn't work.

I know. You've seen the ads on television with that glowing, confident actor surrounded by glowing, adoring women and thought to yourself that you should place an order. Well, according to testimony in an Ohio court, you'd better hold on to your cash.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports:

James Teegarden Jr., the former vice president of operations at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, explained Tuesday in U.S. District Court how he and others at the company made up much of the content that appeared in Enzyte ads.

He said employees of the Forest Park company created fictitious doctors to endorse the pills, fabricated a customer satisfaction survey and made up numbers to back up claims about Enzyte’s effectiveness.

“So all this is a fiction?” Judge S. Arthur Spiegel asked about some of the claims.

“That’s correct, your honor,” Teegarden said.

Who'd have thought that the ads were phony, the numbers were doctored and, heck, even the doctors claiming how great the product was were doctored.

The scam outlined in court called for the company to continually charge a customer's credit card for more pills and make it next to impossible for them to stop the charges. Company execs said without the additional charges, the company couldn't exist.

Now the credit card companies know how to smell a fraud and one of the ways to do that is monitor the number of charge-backs a company experiences. If there are more than one percent charge backs, an account can be suspended pending investigation. The Enzyte folks had a solution.

Berkeley began making small, unauthorized charges to thousands of customer credit cards. The charges were later refunded by the company, but they temporarily boosted total sales and reduced the percentage of charge backs.

It's great that these folks are in court on charges related to the scheme, but one has to wonder where the feds were all the time this was going on.

And why are those ads still on TV?

    - Jim Grinstead