Magic cheeses, Craigslist and the easy way out

As a result Craigslist and several other websites aimed at freelancers have been a frequent destination for my web browsing. If you have spent anytime on Craigslist at all you know that there are quite a few of these posts that promise some high paying figure “working from home” or as a “distributor” of some strange sports gel.

It would be quite nice to just rake in the cash by clicking on web ads or surfing the internet. It would be the easy way out, but I do have to admit, it would also be insanely boring.

The urge to believe that these things might work (and who knows, maybe they do?) seems to be some sort of primordial belief. It goes hand in hand with hope and desperation. Looking for something new, something bigger that will come and lift you out of your hopeless (sic) situation.

In Chile this sensation seems strong. While most Chileans are spared the desperate poverty of some of their neighbors, Chilean slums are much nicer than across the border in Peru or Bolivia, but still there is a large mass of people barely scraping by that haven’t got the things or financial freedom afforded to even the lower middle class in the US.

As a result there are always stories arising in the evening news about the most recent scams. Recently there was a group that called their victims pretending to be a TV executive and told their victims if they brought more cash with them to the studio than other unknown contestants they would win a free house or something. The victim then arrives and is greeted by a nicely dressed individual, who takes their cash and walks off. Middle aged woman seemed particularly susceptible to this tactic.

But there is no scam that seems to have attracted as much attention, both before it was revealed and in the aftermath, as the case of the magic cheeses.

Another characteristic of Chile is that foreign sounding names or companies seem to gain an instant credibility. So when French born “Madame Gil” showed up as a representative of a company called Fermex Chile, people listened.

She had a niche market at her fingertips and was generous enough to cross the world in order to find some “investors.” Starting with a US$ 500 investment, her Chilean partners would manufacture in their home a sort of cheese that could then be used to make cosmetics. It was a market sure to grow and only took 10 days to produce.

The investors, or as we should call them, victims, lined up and bought her package, started making the cheeses and delivering them to Fermex. At first some received a return on their investment, thus intensifying the buzz around the Quesos mágicos.

The buzz grew to an obsession in some places. An entire town in the south of Chile, Coltauco, was almost completely involved. As the word on the street grew, people sold their possessions, even their houses to invest more in this supposedly booming industry. In total Chilean authorities estimate Madame Gil pocketed some US$ 27.8 million through the magic cheese scam.

Then one day she was gone. A continuing stream of TV documentaries and interviews in the paper followed.

Eventually she was caught and is on trial in France. Authorities there have rejected calls to extradite her to Chile. Her victims have organized and hired lawyers, and a judge from France even came to visit some of them. However the investigation moves at a snail’s pace and the chances of her victims recovering their cash seems slight at best.

I realize, maybe it is a stretch to compare the “get paid for doing almost nothing ads” on Craigslist to a magic cheese scam, but when I read pages like this, I can’t help but think of Madame Gil.