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From deadly deceptions to billion-dollar frauds, corporate America has quite the rap sheet! Join us as we expose the most outrageous cases where big businesses were caught red-handed in massive lies. Our countdown includes Nestlé's deadly formula scandal, Theranos' fake blood tests, Big Tobacco's deadly cover-up, and more! Drop your favorite corporate deception in the comments below!
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00:00Do you think she was lying to Walgreens?
00:02I do, yeah.
00:03Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for 10 moments
00:06where some of history's greatest corporate liars
00:08were caught with their grubby hands in the proverbial cookie jar.
00:11Truth has nothing to do with who wins the argument.
00:16Number 10. Nestle Baby Formula Scandal
00:18Few corporate lies have been deadlier than this one.
00:21In the 1970s, Nestle aggressively marketed infant formula in developing countries.
00:25Wherein your market could be found, profit could be made.
00:27They claimed it was healthier and more modern than breastfeeding.
00:30Sales reps dressed as nurses and handed out free samples,
00:33persuading poor mothers to switch.
00:35But once the samples ran out, families had to buy expensive formula.
00:38Worse, in developing nations, they often had to mix it with unsafe water,
00:41stretching it too thin.
00:42Many of the communities targeted by Nestle relied on dirty surface water
00:46that housed harmful bacteria.
00:48The results were catastrophic.
00:50Widespread malnutrition, illness, and infant deaths.
00:52Advocacy groups launched a global boycott in 1977,
00:55accusing Nestle of putting profits before lives.
00:59The scandal forced worldwide changes to the marketing of baby formula.
01:02For a generation, it became the textbook example of predatory corporate deceit.
01:06Number 9. Naked Juice
01:07Turns out that all natural label may not have been so natural after all.
01:11Dude, this isn't just juice. This is naked juice.
01:13In 2016, PepsiCo was hit with lawsuits over its naked juice brand,
01:17accused of misleading health-conscious consumers.
01:20The drinks were marketed as wholesome blends of fruits and vegetables,
01:23plastered with labels like 100% juice, no sugar added, and all natural.
01:27But in reality, many bottles were mostly apple or orange juice spiked with cheaper fillers,
01:31with only trace amounts of the exotic superfoods advertised on the label.
01:34If you bought a popular juice drink in recent years, you could be entitled to a refund.
01:39Plaintiffs also noted the all-natural claim didn't hold up,
01:42since the juices contained synthetic ingredients too.
01:45PepsiCo eventually settled, agreeing to drop the branding.
01:47In the end, naked juice was more about marketing spin than clean living.
01:51So it will no longer make those natural claims,
01:53and the company will refund $9 million to consumers who bought it.
01:58Number 8. Listerine's Exaggerated Claims
02:00For decades, Listerine mouthwash promised miracle cures it couldn't deliver.
02:04Are you ever skeptical about your mouthwash?
02:06I don't use just mouthwash.
02:08I use Listerine.
02:09Ads claimed the product could prevent or treat cold, sore throats, even dandruff.
02:13The Federal Trade Commission finally cracked down in 1976.
02:16I had to come to Paris to discover Listerine.
02:19They ruled that Warner Lambert, the maker of Listerine,
02:22had misled the public for over half a century.
02:24In one of the most famous false advertising cases in history,
02:27the company was ordered to spend millions on corrective ads.
02:29They were finally forced to clear up their lies.
02:31The ruling was blunt, Listerine doesn't prevent cold, it just freshens your breath.
02:35The case set an important precedent,
02:37proving that even century-old household brands couldn't get away with ridiculous health claims.
02:41For Whole Mouth Health, Listerine.
02:43Number 7. AT&T's Unlimited Data
02:45Their claims of unlimited data eventually pushed credulity to the limit.
02:49In 2014, the FTC sued AT&T for misleading millions of customers.
02:54There is a group of people who use a high amount of data, they have unlimited plans,
02:58and AT&T's been trying to punish them.
02:59And now the FTC says, that's not okay.
03:01They honestly thought they were signing up for true unlimited data plans.
03:05They were in for a rude awakening once they hit certain thresholds.
03:08Sometimes it only took a couple of gigabytes.
03:10At that point, AT&T would quietly throttle their speeds, slowing connections by as much as 90%.
03:15Edith Ramirez, the chairwoman of the FTC, says the issue is simple.
03:18Unlimited means unlimited.
03:20Customers who thought they could stream or browse freely had their phones slowed to a crawl.
03:24And there was AT&T, still charging full price for a crippled service.
03:27The deception lasted for years, affecting at least 3.5 million people.
03:31In 2019, AT&T finally agreed to pay $60 million to settle the case.
03:36Along with the fine, AT&T must now clearly disclose any restrictions or information about speed or amount of its mobile data when marketing its data plans.
03:44Number 6, Uber can't stop lying.
03:46Uber built its empire on both disruption and deception.
03:49In 2017, the FTC nailed the company for lying to drivers about how much they could earn.
03:53Uber lured recruits with inflated salary promises and pushed car leases that left many drivers drowning in debt.
03:58And why do you think these rideshare companies keep this information from you guys and from the customers?
04:04Why do you think they hide it?
04:06I think they hide it because they know, we know how much they're charging these passengers and how much, if we knew any more than we already know, what we can demand for.
04:18That was bad enough.
04:19But while this was happening, the company had another scandal brewing.
04:22In 2016, hackers stole personal data from 57 million riders and drivers.
04:26Instead of disclosing the breach, Uber quietly paid the hackers $100,000 to keep it secret.
04:31Well, I don't know what's worse, the hack and the weak, you know, sort of protections or the fact that they hid this for a year.
04:39The cover-up later cost the company $148 million in fines, and its former chief security officer was convicted of hiding the incident.
04:46From drivers to customers, Uber's growth was built on broken trust.
04:50Rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft are dedicated to their bottom line.
04:53And if that means hiding just how much money they're taking from its drivers to avoid widespread backlash, or God forbid, a strike, then that's what they'll do.
05:02Number 5. Enron.
05:04Once hailed as a corporate powerhouse, Enron became the ultimate cautionary tale.
05:08Only a few years ago, Enron was the nation's seventh largest corporation, valued at almost $70 billion.
05:15Pundits praised the company as a new business model.
05:18Its empire was a house of cards built on lies, greed, and creative accounting.
05:22The energy giant dazzled Wall Street with reports of soaring profits, but behind the numbers was a maze of hidden debts and sham partnerships masking billions in losses.
05:30What happened to all that money? It's gone. It's gone.
05:34Executives kept up the act until late 2001 when the company collapsed, and $74 billion in shareholder value vanished.
05:41Overnight, thousands of employees lost their jobs and pensions.
05:45At the peak, I had about $348,000, and I sold it all for $1,200.
05:50The scandal toppled Enron's leadership and destroyed its auditor, Arthur Anderson, once one of the world's largest accounting firms.
05:57In response, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
06:00Enron cooked the books so thoroughly it burned the house down.
06:03I think the larger lesson was what Enron asked of its employees, which was ask why.
06:11And, you know, I didn't ask myself why enough. I didn't ask managers why enough. I didn't ask my colleagues why enough.
06:20Number four, big oil misled public on climate science.
06:23It may seem obvious now, but oil companies were ready to burn the world down for profit.
06:28What you may not know is that they struck that bargain decades ago.
06:31Everything that we studied was basically consistent with the finding that the Earth was going to warm significantly.
06:40And we just were trying to say how it would warm.
06:42As early as 1959, industry scientists warned that fossil fuels could dangerously heat the planet.
06:48There is a level of foreknowledge by the fossil fuel industry that business as usual will lead to disaster around the world.
06:57By the late 1970s, Exxon and other oil giants had mountains of detailed internal research.
07:02They knew rising CO2 levels, melting ice caps, and devastating climate impacts were on the horizon.
07:07But instead of warning the public, big oil buried the findings and doubled down on lobbying.
07:11In the 1980s and 1990s, they bankrolled think tanks and PR campaigns to cast doubt on climate science and stall regulation.
07:18They were arguing that I had purged all discussion of uncertainty from the document, which was patently untrue.
07:26A 2024 Senate report confirmed the industry misled the public for generations.
07:31Number three, ExxonMobil lied about plastics recycling.
07:34For decades, ExxonMobil told the public a comforting story.
07:37Namely, that plastic wasn't a real problem and could be easily recycled.
07:40California's attorney general sued ExxonMobil today, saying the oil giant misled the public about the limitations of plastics recycling.
07:50Buy a lot?
07:50In 2024, California sued the company for what it called one of history's biggest consumer deceptions.
07:56ExxonMobil and other oil giants promoted the recycling symbol, commercials, and public campaigns, suggesting plastics were easily reusable.
08:03It perpetuated a single-use throwaway lifestyle, saying it's okay, use as much as you want, whenever you want, it can be recycled.
08:12But internal documents revealed they knew the truth all along.
08:15Most plastics can't be recycled economically, and the vast majority ends up in landfills, incinerators, or oceans.
08:21What is your response to the attorney general of California saying you've basically lied for decades about recycling working?
08:28Obviously, it's an open investigation, and I prefer not to comment on that.
08:32The lawsuit argues Exxon misled consumers to protect its bottom line while the plastic crisis ballooned worldwide.
08:39By selling the myth of recycling, Exxon bought itself decades of profits.
08:43Meanwhile, the world chokes on their broken promises.
08:46Number two, Theranos.
08:47Once hailed as Silicon Valley's next great unicorn, Theranos turned out to be a $9 billion mirage.
08:52Founder Elizabeth Holmes planned to revolutionize blood testing.
08:55She promised a sleek little machine that could run hundreds of tests on just a few drops of blood.
09:13Investors, politicians, and even the media bopped the story.
09:16There was one little problem.
09:17The technology was fake.
09:19But Elizabeth Holmes had told Walgreens in 2010 that it had developed this device that was capable of running any blood test from a few drops pricked from a finger in real time and less than half the cost of traditional labs.
09:31Was that true?
09:32No.
09:33Certainly not.
09:34Behind the glossy facade, Theranos secretly relied on traditional machines.
09:38They lied to patients, doctors, and regulators alike.
09:40Critical medical decisions were made based on faulty results.
09:43Whistleblowers and reporters eventually exposed the fraud, leading to the company's collapse in 2016.
09:48Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, were later convicted of fraud.
09:52Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos.
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10:07Number one, the tobacco industry on cigarettes.
10:10Few lies have cost more lives than Big Tobacco's half-century of deception.
10:15Yes, the 1964 U.S. Surgeon General's report definitively linked smoking to cancer.
10:21And internal memos prove they knew the risks all along.
10:23It is our vision to create a smoke-free world.
10:29As we continue to make billions selling cigarettes around the world that kill more than 8 million people.
10:35But this only encouraged a bloody war on the battlefield of public opinion.
10:39They bankrolled junk science, hired PR firms, and pushed marketing that downplayed the dangers.
10:44For decades, they claimed smoking wasn't addictive, while secretly engineering cigarettes to deliver more nicotine.
10:49I believe with nicotine, it's not addictive.
10:53It took lawsuits in the 1990s and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement to finally expose the conspiracy.
10:58This industry, in my opinion, is an industry who has perpetrated the biggest fraud on the American public in history.
11:05By then, millions of deaths could be traced to an industry that knowingly sold literal poison.
11:10All the while, they created cartoon camels to say nothing to see here.
11:14Drop your favorite corporate oopsie in the comments below.
11:17Bonus points if it dinged your faith in humanity.
11:19Our tobacco businesses successfully executed their strategies.
11:24Our tobacco businesses successfully executed their strategies.
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