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I read about a scam somewhere (probably apocryphal) that a doctor could guarantee a boy. People cheerfully paid the fee and undertook the procedure. If a boy w

by billpg 16y ago

I read about a scam somewhere (probably apocryphal) that a doctor could guarantee a boy. People cheerfully paid the fee and undertook the procedure. If a boy was born, everyone was happy and the doctor kept his fee. If a girl was born, the parents would go back to the doctor where he would explain that the technique wasn't 100% reliable but happily gave a refund with a little extra as a goodwill gesture. The scam was thet the doctor wasn't doing anything at all. Births remained roughly half boys and half girls. The fees paid by parents of baby boys more than covered the running costs and the goodwill payments. (I'm not going to check Snopes. Its such a good story I don't really care if its real or not.)

dspillett 16y ago
I'd be surprised if it isn't true, and isn't happening right now in several places. It seems like a really simple scam that would work well and not attract enough attention to fail due to the "doctor" getting a bad rep unless some of those the "treatment" failed for were not happy with the level of compensation. Back in the days when cheques were common there was a great scam in the UK. A company promising to sell porn magazines and VHS tapes at (for the time) cheap but believable prices, but never sending out any product (never actually having any stock). They just worked on the basis that most people would not complain. When people did complain they appologised, gave some excuse about their importers failing to deliver or some such, and a full refund was sent by cheque. To reduce the outgoings, the cheques carried the (obviously porn related) name of the company meaning many people didn't want to pay them in as it would require looking the cashier in the eye if they noticed where the cheque had come from (there were no automated cheque processing machines back then). The scam only came to light when the "company" was investigated for other irregularities (IIRC some of the products they were claiming to sell were illegal, or at least close enough to the legal borderline to warrant investigation, which is what caught the eye of the authorities).
benhoyt 16y ago
My mother-in-law tells a story of a doctor she knew who would tell parents-to-be he could always predict the sex of their baby (this was before scans were so common). He would tell them "boy" and would write it down on a piece of paper and put in a drawer, "so neither of us forgets". If it was a boy, they'd be very impressed. If it was a girl, they'd go back to him, he'd pull out the piece of paper to prove to them, no, he had been right. Of course on the paper he'd written "girl".
shrikant 16y ago
There are many MANY old wives' tales in India about diets and techniques to guarantee male offspring, so you can be assured that there are crooks and charlatans taking advantage of a wilfully gullible populace. I wouldn't be surprised if the more unscrupulous ones took this to a greater extreme.
sobbybutter 16y ago
This reminds me of an old stock tip scam. A scammer would mail a large number of stock tip letters, 50% claiming that the market would move up the following week and 50% claiming that it would go down. The scammer would then repeat this each week, but would only send new batches to the people who had gotten the letters that had the correct "prediction" the previous week. After a while, some people would believe in the scam letters, as so many of them had "predicted" the market correctly. Falling for the scam, those people would send large sums of money to continue to receive the stock tips, leaving the scammers rich.

by billpg 16y ago

dspillett 16y ago

I'd be surprised if it isn't true, and isn't happening right now in several places. It seems like a really simple scam that would work well and not attract enough attention to fail due to the "doctor" getting a bad rep unless some of those the "treatment" failed for were not happy with the level of compensation. Back in the days when cheques were common there was a great scam in the UK. A company promising to sell porn magazines and VHS tapes at (for the time) cheap but believable prices, but never sending out any product (never actually having any stock). They just worked on the basis that most people would not complain. When people did complain they appologised, gave some excuse about their importers failing to deliver or some such, and a full refund was sent by cheque. To reduce the outgoings, the cheques carried the (obviously porn related) name of the company meaning many people didn't want to pay them in as it would require looking the cashier in the eye if they noticed where the cheque had come from (there were no automated cheque processing machines back then). The scam only came to light when the "company" was investigated for other irregularities (IIRC some of the products they were claiming to sell were illegal, or at least close enough to the legal borderline to warrant investigation, which is what caught the eye of the authorities).

benhoyt 16y ago

My mother-in-law tells a story of a doctor she knew who would tell parents-to-be he could always predict the sex of their baby (this was before scans were so common). He would tell them "boy" and would write it down on a piece of paper and put in a drawer, "so neither of us forgets". If it was a boy, they'd be very impressed. If it was a girl, they'd go back to him, he'd pull out the piece of paper to prove to them, no, he had been right. Of course on the paper he'd written "girl".

shrikant 16y ago

There are many MANY old wives' tales in India about diets and techniques to guarantee male offspring, so you can be assured that there are crooks and charlatans taking advantage of a wilfully gullible populace. I wouldn't be surprised if the more unscrupulous ones took this to a greater extreme.

sobbybutter 16y ago

This reminds me of an old stock tip scam. A scammer would mail a large number of stock tip letters, 50% claiming that the market would move up the following week and 50% claiming that it would go down. The scammer would then repeat this each week, but would only send new batches to the people who had gotten the letters that had the correct "prediction" the previous week. After a while, some people would believe in the scam letters, as so many of them had "predicted" the market correctly. Falling for the scam, those people would send large sums of money to continue to receive the stock tips, leaving the scammers rich.