Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Profiteering from 9/11

Last night I watched an infomercial for a non-circulating coin commemerating 9/11 made by the National Collector’s Mint.  Behind the narrarator played America the Beautiful, and it was all done up in red, white, and blue.  All very patriotic.  But as the infomercial played, I couldn’t help but get more and more appalled by what I was hearing.  This was not a product intended to commemerate 9/11, it was a product designed to fleece gullible people out of $150.

The infomercial talks about this gold struck coin with a void where the Twin Towers used to stand and the New York skyline in the back.  Then the coin has a silver struck Twin Towers area added to that void that stands up (yes, this is a pop-up coin).  Ok, no biggy.  Then they hit you with the fact that the silver was “recovered from vaults beneath the ashes of Ground Zero.” The implication is that it’s from the Twin Towers.

The infomercial makes it clear that the coin is struck of 24 carat gold and “.999 pure” silver, but unless you listen very closely, you’ll never hear the fact that the coin is CLAD in 15 mg of gold and silver, NOT made of pure gold and silver.  I missed it the first time and it took visiting the website and being forced to listen to the same infomercial again without a pause/stop button to catch it.

Finally, the maker of the coin is “National Collector’s Mint,” a company that makes its money by selling cheap knock-offs of real coins and by using deceptive advertising to drum up customers (check out this link too).

If you go to www.WTCProof.com, you can see the informercial for yourself.  I find it interesting that there is no additional information beyond the front page - the makers of this “commemerative coin” aren’t exactly standing behind their product.

Anyone who knows a family member of friend of a 9/11 victim should shoot them this link.  Eliot Spitzer nailed these scuzzballs to the wall once for doing this, and they’re at it again.  The victims of 9/11 deserve better than to be falsely memorialized by a crappy, fake coin of nearly no monetary value.  They deserve to have their loss respected, not profiteered from.