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Just one drop of my medicine will cure all the side effects of my medicine!

"Do you suffer from rheumatism? Lumbago? Acute, chronic, sciatic, uh, neurologic, or inflammatory pain? Well, I represent the only company that makes the genuine article that cures, headaches, neuralgia, uh, earache, toothaches, backaches, swellings, sprains, sore chest, swelling of the throats, contracted chords and muscles, anxieties, and ravaged nerves, stiff joints, wrenches, dislocations, cuts and bruises! And, it adds vitality and vigor to the healthy man."
Dr. Nigel West Dickens, Red Dead Redemption, to a group of gullible country folk

A specific type of itinerant Con Man who makes his living by selling products which could not possibly work as advertised. The classic version sells literal snake oil (i.e. a product with 'medicinal' properties and exotic, unknown ingredients). A minor variation on this character is the Rainmaker, who takes people's money under the pretense that they will do something that they have no ability to do, such as making it rain.

This shady dealer is somewhat similar to the Hustler in being both less financially stable and having a poorer group of victims as well, and also has some overlap with the Honest John as being a purveyor of shoddy goods, not always phony medicine.

The character is often played as a Loveable Rogue, frequently being extremely attractive to local women because he's "seen the world" (or at least can convincingly pretend that he has). He's often inexplicably sympathetic, given that he makes his money hawking fake medicine for genuine ailments — though the audience will generally be less sympathetic if he's got a big, professional-looking operation, especially if he uses shills and/or he clearly knows his cures are bogus.

Definitely Truth in Television, hearkening back to the late-19th/early-20th century, when there were no standards for practicing medicine or selling goods and "caveat emptor"note  was the rule. The rise of "alternative medicine" and other forms of All-Natural Snake Oil provides lots of modern examples as well, as do online scams (think of ads along the lines of "doctors hate this man who cured X with one weird trick!"). A Snake Oil Salesman is also known as a "quack", short for "quacksalver", though the term "quack" also covers fraudulent doctors who are nowhere near as skilled as they claim to be, such as the worst Back Alley Doctors. Any beneficial results given by the "medicine" are almost certainly down to the Placebo Effect.

In an interesting subversion, actual snake oil contains plenty of Omega-3, which has known therapeutic effects. However, in a Double Subversion, the actual benefits are so vague to laymen that the modern version of this could be "Fish Oil" or "Omega-3 Salesman". Also, oil from the Chinese Water Snake has been used for a very long time in Chinese medicine, though not as the extreme panacea advertised by this sort of character (indeed, this connotation is largely unknown in Chinanote ). Rather, it's merely used as an ordinary anti-inflammatory agent, originally introduced into the United States by Chinese railroad workers. The modern definition originated with Clark Stanley, a Texas businessman who claimed to have received Hopi knowledge about the medicinal properties of rattlesnake oil — as it turns out, his medicine contained virtually no such oil, and in 1989 it was established that real rattlesnake oil contained only one-third of the Omega-3 content of their Chinese counterparts.

Similar to the Fake Faith Healer, but without the religious overtones.

Expect to find actual Snake Oil Salesmen at the local Medicine Show.

NB: To count as an example, the Snake Oil Salesman has to be knowingly hawking fake medicine. Well-intentioned ignorance fits better under Worst Aid.


Examples:

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  • Played for Laughs with Macfuddy's Pepper Elixir, a cola marketed like patent medicine. It's got such outrageous claims on it as "Infused with Luck! For 24 hours of favourable outcomes." and "Cures timidity and satisfies the daring!" In reality, it's spicy pop with a cool label.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Fairy Tail: Daphne peddles "Metamo-chan", a kind of kabob she says helps weight loss. When the heroes meet her, she outright admits it's all bogus. Particularly because she's less interested in scamming them and more interested in catching Natsu to power her giant mechanical dragon.
  • One Piece: When the Straw Hats infiltrate the isolated country of Wano, Usopp poses as a toad oil salesman, claiming that the oil can heal any injury.
  • In Pokemon, there's the Magikarp Salesman, inspired by the one in the game. He first appeared on the St. Anne in Kanto where he conned James into buying a Magikarp, and since then has suckered James and Jesse into buying other worthless Pokémon, including another Magikarp and a Hoppip.
  • Welcome to the NHK: Megumi Kobayashi ends up becoming one when she gets roped into a Ponzi scheme in order to support herself and her Hikkikomori brother. She ropes in her old classmate Tatsuhiro Sato, and when he tries to get out of the scheme, keeps him in (and ropes his friends in) with a dietary supplement which, according to her, is suited for helping hikkikomori overcome their condition.

    Comic Books 
  • In the Blacksad story "A Silent Hell", the Big Bad in his past sold an elixir he called "Life Everlasting" which was supposedly a cure for asthma and flu. In reality, it was a deadly poison which killed not only its users, but also their possible children, resulting in dozens of stillbirths and deformed infants. He got away with it because Life Everlasting was sold to an illiterate and uneducated town who didn't realize what was going on until it was too late, he bribed a corrupt judge to look the other way, and silenced anyone who tried to draw attention to this atrocity.
  • The Haunted Mansion: According to the comic-book adaptation, Hitchhiking Ghost Phineas was one of these, having died from taking a tumble off a cliff during one of his escapes from an angry mob. Trying to take his trade into the afterlife at the Mansion results in trouble with the resident ghosts, so he ends up futily hitchhiking to find better pastures.
  • Lucky Luke:
    • Dr. Doxey is portrayed more unsympathetically than it is usual for the trope. He is a charlatan who travels the United States to sell his worthless elixir. He does not hesitate to use dishonest means to achieve his ends. For example, he is willing to poison entire villages to create demand for his "medicine".
    • In "Sarah Bernhardt", the theatre company breaks out in hives after eating whale meat for too long. They encounter a traveling salesman that can cure everything ("Ehm... and especially hives!")... with his whale oil elixir.
      Salesman (fleeing the furious mob): What did I do!? What did I do!?
  • One issue of The Muppet Show Comic Book reinvents Dr Bob of Veterinarian's Hospital as a frontier medicine man. At one point he asks Nurse Piggy if they can get any more "medicinal compound" out of the cat.
  • PS238: The Rainmaker is an actual mutant with the fairly lame power of making it start or stop raining. He tries to make a living as a, well, rainmaker, but because of the countless frauds who have gone before him, nobody will pay him up front, and most of the time they turn out to be unwilling or unable to pay him afterwards - and as he puts it, he can hardly pull the rain back outta the ground.
  • Superman:
    • The Living Legends of Superman: In the year 2199, an old man named Homer is peddling "Superman nectar" in a Moon colony, claiming Superman gave him the secret of his own personal cure-all as a reward for saving his life. When a young kid skeptically points out that his story is full of holes, Homer asks him to take a swig and give his opinion. The boy takes a sip and declares it to be delicious, prompting the crowd of curious onlookers to buy more bottles, since they are more concerned with the juice tasting good than its alleged panacea properties. Shortly later, Homer is leaving the town together with the skeptical kid, who turns out to be his grandson. Needless to say, he never met Superman.
    • A Supergirl story published in Action Comics #254 has the Dales, a couple of swindlers who sold a so-called "Power Tonic" which supposedly granted Super-Strength, allegedly "made from an ancient Indian formula". In reality, it was sugared water flavored with ginger to make it taste "powerful".
      Mr. Dale: My daughter gained her super-strength by drinking this power tonic every day for one month! It's made from an ancient Indian formula! Drink it and it will give you the same powers, folks!
      Linda Lee: (thinking) Great Krypton! This was all a... a racket!
  • The Three Caballeros: Jose Carioca once helped his cousin Joe sell candy to his neighbours, knowing full well that the candy was too impossibly hard for anyone to actually eat. Despite his attempts to put as much responsibility for the candy on his cousin, they both get beaten up by an angry mob.
  • The Transformers (IDW): Swindle sells custom Cybertronian guns to the human populace to protect against invading Decepticons using artificial humans. The guns also allow Decepticons to take control of human buyers. According to Vector Prime, in Transtech he also sells an item called the "Placebotron 5000," which is 'guaranteed' to cure all manner of Cybertronian maladies (which of course doesn't work, not that he honors any guarantees), making him a more traditional version of this trope to his fellow Cybertronians.

    Comic Strips 
  • Calvin and Hobbes: In one strip, Calvin decides to set up a stand selling drainage ditch water as "Calvin's Curative Elixir" at a dollar a glass. When Hobbes tells him nobody will pay to drink what is obviously just filthy water, Calvin changes his pitch to "Pitcher of Plague: Calvin's Debilitating Disease Drink! $1.00 not to have any."
  • The Far Side: One strip has a man fending off a werewolf, flashing back to earlier that day when the salesman assures him that the bullets he's buying are silver, as the caption notes how the man recognises the familiar-looking tie around the werewolf's neck...
  • In the Hurricane of Puns comic strip Sir Bagby, there was a story arc where Sir Bagby encountered a snake oil salesman; his first reaction was a bemused "I hadn't realised so many people had squeaky snakes."

    Fan Works 
  • The Great Alicorn Hunt has a unicorn calling himself "Professor" Cotton Mouth who sold a group of pregnant mares an elixir that caused severe birth defects, resulting in a number of stillbirths, and a few foals that died within a short time, and some maternal deaths as well. Ten odd years later only two foals that were exposed have survived, one of them by ascending to alicornhood in utero. Played with when he reappears later on in the story, as he genuinely thought that the Vitality Elixer would work as advertised, as negative side effects didn't show up in his initial test subject (himself) until after he'd already sold it to the mares, by which point it was too late. He's regretted it ever since.
  • The Magikarp Salesman has a small role in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, by selling one of his Magikarp to Misty. While she saw through his scam quickly, she intentionally played dumb to get him to reveal his personal info, which she plans to use to get him arrested.

    Films — Animation 
  • Aloha, Scooby-Doo!: Jared Moon makes a bundle of money selling trinkets to ward off the wiki tikis. Obviously, they don't work. To be fair, the monster isn't real, but there''s no indication Moon had any reason to think that they did have magical protective abilities against genuine monsters.
  • Kronk's New Groove: Yzma becomes this when she has Kronk sell a fake youth potion to the old folks. Lampshaded by Kuzco, who halts the film to point this out.
  • Secret Magic Control Agency: Hansel is seen selling fake protective charms to the audience at his magic show. He claims that they protect against curses, but his demonstration of the use of the amulets was all just stage magic.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Contagion (2011) has a modern example. A novel virus pandemic is causing mass panic while scientists and governmental organizations are trying to play catch up. Krumwielde, a conspiracy blogger, takes advantage of the hysteria to sell Forsythia as a fake cure while also spreading rumors to discredit the upcoming vaccine.
  • The Half-Breed: Dick Curson is a very shady example who pushes a useless patent medicine from the back of a wagon. He's also a sleazebag who patronizes prostitutes and dumps his companion Teresa after taking a fancy to one in particular.
  • Danny Kaye's character Georgi in The Inspector General (1949) starts the film as the assistant of Snake Oil Salesman Yakov, but turns out to be too honest for the job.
  • Jonah Hex (2010): Lilah encounters a snake oil salesman on a stagecoach in a deleted scene. He attempts to sell her a vile looking green concoction, but winds up covered in it when the stagecoach goes out of control.
  • In Kaamelott: Premier Volet, gift shops and all sorts of charlatans selling "miracle healing" products have popped up around Excalibur in the Stone when Arthur Pendragon comes back to the Kingdom of Logres to reclaim the sword.
  • In The Kid Brother, Harold Lloyd as the son of the sheriff is supposed to run off the Medicine Show but falls for the Snake Oil Salesman's lovely daughter instead.
  • Mr. Merriweather, in Little Big Man. Protagonist Jack Crabb also becomes one of these as his assistant.
  • In A Million Ways to Die in the West, Albert and Anna meet one at the fair who is cheerfully selling medical tonics and elixers that are clearly a crock of shit, going by the list of ingredients of one bottle.
    Anna: Cocaine, alcohol, morphine, mercury with chalk? What the hell is "mercury with chalk"?
    Salesman: Science!
    Albert: And "red flannel". Red flannel? There's a shirt in here?
    Salesman: Pieces of shirt.
  • Night Call Nurses: One random scene has a snake oil salesman who glories in the name of E. Eddie Edwards trying to sell the hospital bogus medications. When the doctor points out that one of the medications is known to cause Parkinson's, Eddie says that he has another medication that can cure that.
  • One of these appears in The Outlaw Josey Wales, primarily as a target for Josey's contempt and rather rough frontier humor.
  • In Outlaw Women, Uncle Barney arrives in town with his Medicine Show, peddling his Blackfoot Balm which he claims can cure anything from baldness to cattle bloat. After he becomes the bartender at the Paradise, he continues to peddle it from below the bar.
  • Doc Terminus from Pete's Dragon (1977) is a villainous version - and indeed, his song, "Passamaquaddy" is practically a Snake Oil Salesman theme song. He's also comically incompetent; he's been run out of every town he's ever visited, and he anticipates — and gets — an unfriendly reception when he winds up in one of those towns a second time. Oddly enough, the primary character who believes his products aren't useless quack remedies is... Doc Terminus himself. At the very least, he trusts his recipe book's claims about the merits of dragon parts.
  • Priest (2011). Honest John is trying to sell a potion that wards off vampires when the sheriff shoots the bottle out of his hand.
  • Rio Lobo: Sasha has a medicine wagon, and travelled with its properties before the bad guys killed him. Based on the way some characters talk about the snake oil medicine in question, it's essentially alcohol.
  • Saw X sees John Kramer going after a group of these, who claimed to be able to cure his cancer.
  • In Seraphim Falls, the leading characters meet Madam Louise C. Fair.
  • The Serpent and the Rainbow: Louis Mozart zigzags this. He makes a living selling zombie powder which simulates death (and which the pharmaceutical company the hero works for wants to secured use as a new anesthetic). Mozart can make the actual powder (and is quite good at it), but since it's generally used as a poison he generally just sells his clients actual poison (which is far less difficult to make) instead and lets them think it's zombie powder.
  • The Stooges in Snow White and the Three Stooges were this until they rescued Prince Charming from an assassination attempt.
  • Tin Men is about shady aluminum siding salesmen.
  • Radomir from the Soviet movie Uchenik Lekarya (The Doctor's Apprentice) starts out as this, selling "medicine" for old age, stupidity etc. He becomes a real doctor to help his girlfriend's mother.
  • Professor Marvel in The Wizard of Oz movie, played by the same actor as the wizard himself. He was more the Lovable Rogue type, and after finding out Dorothy ran away, tricks her into going back home by using his fortunetelling act to make her think her aunt is ill.
  • In the first singing cowboy movie, Tumbling Tumbleweeds, Gene Autry plays a confidant to a snake oil salesman played by Gabby Hayes.

    Literature 
  • The Amy Virus: Cyan's parents, Dr. Nansi, and the others who promote the fraudulent Good Brain Diet to "cure" autism make most of their cash off of blogging about it. At the end, Cyan, her mother, and Eroica decide to write a blog post exposing the truth about the diet in order to shut the scam down.
  • Beware of Chicken: If Hong Xian didn't know better, he would have assumed that the elixir produced from Jin's "lowly spiritual herbs" must be a variety of snake oil.
    Seven Fragrance Jewel Herb Liquid, grown by a powerful cultivator and then refined through the lightning of a dragon and the medicinal Qi of another powerful cultivator.
    In any other case, it would sound like the creation of a charlatan. If a traveler dared to say that this was the method to obtain the sparkling concoction within, they would have been chased out of town for trying to swindle the population.
  • Discworld: C.M.O.T. Dibbler might be best known for selling pig-sausages in a bun, but he'll turn to this if there's a profit to made. For example, when a dragon was rampaging the city, he was remarkably quick to procure and sell "dragon lotion".
  • Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry is a religious version, although his occasional moments of sincere belief in what he's preaching (especially in the film version) cross him over somewhat into more complicated Hypocrite territory.
  • In the children's Christmas book Emmett Otter and the Jug-Band Christmas, Emmett's late father was literally a snake oil salesman. He boated up and down the river selling snake oil. (A Running Gag in the book was that he was unsuccessful because "nobody wanted to oil any snakes.")
  • The title character in The Good Soldier Švejk sells dogs; as the book describes, they're "ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged." He once talked a woman, who wanted to buy a parrot, into buying a bulldog.
  • In the children's book The Great American Elephant Chase, Michael Keenan makes a living running a traveling elephant show. However, he has a sideline selling bottles of "elephant tonic", proving its healing powers by publicly curing a crippled girl. Unbeknownst to the audience, the girl is his daughter and perfectly healthy.
  • Harry Potter:
    • While no specific people fit this in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Arthur Weasley is put in charge of the newly created Office of the Detection and Confiscation of Counterfeit Defensive Spells and Protective Objects. Its sole directive is to weed out those trying to sell illegal counterfeit and faux protective items and spells.
    • The only real mention of someone is a wizard who tries to sell Ginny such a item, a necklace 'to protect her pretty neck'. Arthur threatens him, saying if he were only on duty.
    • Judging by Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, some of Hogwarts' sixth and seventh year students turn into these around O.W.L. exam time, selling dubious brain stimulants such as Baruffio's Brain Elixir and alleged powdered dragon claw (which was actually dried Doxy droppings; genuine dragon claw actually does help but a student would be unlikely to get it).
  • Holes: An example where it's not so much a fake cure-all as an exaggeration. Onions are used as home remedies and often to alleviate symptoms of various diseases, and it's even possible Sam's donkey Mary Lou is twice his age. However, curing measles, not so much.
  • The Holts: In Oregon Legacy, during a local epidemic, Janessa calls to task a peddler of fake medicines, whose only defense was pointing out that Janessa was a woman, regardless if she was a medical student. (It was the late 1880s, after all).
  • The Mermaid's Sister: While Maren can still walk, she and Clara go to see a traveling show, where a man named Dr. Phipps sells a variety of mysterious conconctions that he claims can cure any ailment. Maren and Clara have been warned not to buy anything from him, but some of the other visitors get suckered. Over the next few days, many people get sick from taking the elixirs. Auntie makes herbal remedies to help them.
  • The short story "Mr. Kennedy's Bones" by Johnny D. Boggs eventually has the Villain Protagonist traveling the west selling a worthless elixir that just makes people sick, while also carrying around the skeleton of his old partner in crime. He eventually gets tarred and feathered over it.
  • Much Ado About Grbstake: Randall, the Mouth of Sauron, spent two years in prison for selling useless medicine in the past. He wants to hide this to maintain his ability to get people to sell him land. Arley grudgingly admits that he manages to sound persuasive even when she's certain that he's lying to her.
  • "Dr." Claudius Mundy in The Orphan Train Adventures book "A Place to Belong". One of his "medicines" caused a patient to die in New York City. Doesn't prevent him from selling his purported medications in St. Joseph, Missouri.
  • Professor Sarlatt in the J.A. Johnstone novel Sidewinders The Butcher Of Bear Creek runs a medicine wagon (with a Lovely Assistant and a simple-minded man he's raised as a son to help him out) claiming that it restores vitality and reduces aging. It's implied that there really is something to Sarlatt's elixir (as he's been drinking it for years and is about twenty years older than he looks) and he claims that he really did feel good about selling people a genuinely helpful product but he always wanted to do more and eventually fell in with an outlaw gang who robbed his wagon, out of both greed and to keep them from killing him, scheming to help the gang with their plan for Taking Over the Town and ultimately committing several murders to help them.
  • This is Zigzagged with Sylvester McMonkey McBean In the Dr. Seuss' book The Sneetches and Other Stories. Technically, he's not peddling "snake oil", seeing as the services he sells actually work and does exactly what he claims. However, he cleverly uses his Star-On Machine and Star-Off Machine to milk the Sneeches for everything they've got, playing on their obsession over those dumb stars.
  • In Time Scout, a number of these guys infest the time terminal commons. Skeeter Jackson gets a start on this scam, but gets interrupted by an angry gladiator.
  • Aunt Polly in Tom Sawyer is clearly a victim of charlatans like this, even though we never see who they are, buying quack remedies to give to Tom.
  • An Unkindness of Ghosts: Jane, the "queen of snake oil," sells all manner of sketchy serums that rarely do what they're supposed to do and often have horrifying side effects.
    Haneefa: That greedy cow would sell a ball of lint and call it a cure for cancer. For all you know, you swallowed a vial of arsenic.
  • In Winds of Fury Firesong's cover when sneaking into Hardorn was as a stage magician/snake oil salesman. His magical cure-all was brandy mixed with some medicinal herbs, which made it theoretically healthy and of considerably higher quality than most things sold by such people.

    Live-Action TV 
  • 7 Yüz: Oşa, who aids protagonist Pınar in "Hayatın Musikisi", is unmasked as a sham and a swindler when he is arrested for fraudulent business practices and misleading his clients.
  • In The Adventures of Pete & Pete the two Pete's make a con where they sweep a neighbors yard for landmines, they first plant a landmine in the lawn, knock on the door, and then throw a toy at the landmine to convince the customer.
  • A frequent occurrence in Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show, most notably in the episode "Aunt Bee's Medicine Man". After having a very bad week and being upset with her doctor telling her that she is getting older, Bee discovers the eponymous medicine man, hawking a medicine meant to help alleviate sadness and depression. Bee immediately buys two bottles of the "medicine", and in the following days she is very happy. Too happy, as Andy and Barney notice. By the time they discover that the "medicine" is more than 80% percent alcohol, it's too late and Bee and her entire church committee have gotten plastered out of their minds by the time Andy and Barney get back to Andy's house. Aunt Bee apologizes and soon goes back to her doctor (whom she now has a much better appreciation for).
  • Parodied on The Chaser's War On Everything, with Chas peddling such products as Oil of Snake, Bollocks and Feng Shite. If you believe their audio commentary, the scene was not a case of Selective Stupidity - everyone they talked to fell for it.
  • In Copper, as per the page quote, Sarah Freeman is sold a "miracle cure" by a traveling salesman. It turns out to just be a mix of water and alcohol, and Sarah's physician husband, Matthew, proceeds to beat the shit out of said salesman in front of a crowd of potential scam victims.
  • One named Zerbo was a recurring character on Cowboy G-Men, often using a Paper-Thin Disguise and running afoul of the hero's sidekick Stoney Crockett. He also tried other scams, but evaded prosecution by helping the heroes out of jams.
  • Dead Man's Gun:
    • Reverend Early in "The Wages of Sin" is a drinker, womanizer and con artist who sells healing elixir with his two assistants (one of whom believes it's real, one of whom doesn't) that is really just river water mixed with molasses. Later in the episode, Early comes to believe that he's developed genuine mystical healing powers and starts over-extending himself as a result. Really it was the more innocent of his assistants though.
    • In "The Oath" during the middle of an outbreak of illness a man shows up selling bottles of a supposed cure that's really just corn syrup. He turns out to be working for the sleazy mayor. He ends up sick himself and begging for real medicine.
  • Doctor Who: In "Rise of the Cybermen", the President of an alternate-universe Great Britain accuses Pete Tyler of being this in a discussion, having tried some of his supposed health-food drink Vitex, only to find out it's just pop.
    President: You made money by selling a health-food drink to a sick world. Not quite the ordinary Joe you appear to be, are you?
  • Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman:
    • A season-one episode involves a snake-oil show coming to town. Naturally, Dr. Mike, unlike the rest of the town, takes issue with the effects of the "perfect elixir" peddled by Dr. Eli (played by Robert Culp, who had once played Buffalo Bill Cody in a similar manner). A good deal of the emphasis is also placed on how touring "wild west" and medicine shows like the one depicted demeaned Native Americans involved in them.
    • Another episode involves a man, asking people to invest in a "home refrigeration box", even showing drawings of such a machine. Not everyone is sold, but this changes when a visiting black man asks to invest as well. The con man pretends to be racist, but eventually accepts his money, as well as those of the other black folks in the area. In the end, both turn out to be partners, scamming towns of their money, themselves not believing that such a device would ever be possible (spoiler alert: it will be). Then they themselves get cleaned out of all the money they took from the town by Dr. Quinn and Reverend Johnson. This is the first time the latter uses his hustling skills since he became a minister.
  • Forever: "Fountain of Youth" involves deaths connected with a modern-day snake-oil business. When made properly with expensive stem cells, the treatment in question actually does work. However, to save money, unbeknownst to its customers (although known to the front man, who uses it anyway), it is instead being made from human brains, resulting in fatal prion infections in people who use it. The flashbacks show one of his friends trying (fairly painful) electroshock therapy after being diagnosed with tuberculosis.
  • Game of Thrones: Bronn accuses Pyromancer Hallyne of being one of these, even going so far as to suggest that the wildfire he's making is actually pigshit, much to the man's affront. Averted during the Battle of the Blackwater when his wildfire turns out to be the real deal.
  • On Good Eats, Alton pretended to be one of these in the celery episode, selling a "tonic" made from celery seeds. Complete with a stooge in the audience claiming that it made his hair grow back.
  • The Goodies. In "Hospital for Hire", the Goodies are so frustrated with the National Health Service that resident genius Graham invents a tonic that can cure anything, and the Goodies are shown pitching it in a classic travelling snake oil salesman act. The irony is that the tonic really does work and they end up curing everyone in the country causing the hospitals to shut down, leaving no-one to cure the Goodies when they fall ill after running out of tonic.
  • Before she died and went to The Good Place, Eleanor's job was to sell a fake allergy medication called NasaPRO, (and its senior citizen-marketed variant NasaPRO Silver), which legally couldn't be called medicine because it doesn't technically "work" and is technically "chalk".
    Chidi: So your job was to defraud the elderly... Sorry, the sick and elderly?
    Eleanor: But I was very good at it. I was the top salesperson five years running.
  • Gunsmoke had Professor Lute Bone, whose "Miracle Tonic's" active ingredient was opium. As a twist on the usual, he was firmly against alcohol abuse.
  • Doctors Dean and Dana Deville in Hustle, who sell bottles and tins of garbage as cures for everything from arthritis to swine flu, are decidedly unsympathetic Smug Snakes. Their latest scheme, when the Hustle gang target them, is "Eat Yourself Slender", which puts a friend of the gang into hospital.
  • Jeremiah:
    • Downplayed with traveling doctor Reese and his brother from "The Bag". They use a lot of fancy terms they may not fully understand, have some pretty old medicine bottles, and don't tend to stick around for too long after providing services, but the Reese's remedies and operations do seem to work.
    • In "Red Kiss", apothecary Medicine Joe claims the substandard marijuana he sells is hallucinogenic, libido-boosting, and a blood purifier. He also sells small amounts of blood from kidnapped children as a vaccine against The Virus that killed all of the adults 15 years ago and may return some day. However, given that Medicine Joe was a child during the collapse of civilization, it's possible that. as a result of his limited education, he genuinely believes that his products can do all of that. Jeremiah accuses Joe’s supplier of stoking fear to sell a placebo, although the man claims he is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who has found a necessary cure.
  • An episode of Kung Fu (1972) featured a woman named Theodora (played by Diana Muldaur) whose "magic elixir" was stream water mixed with leaves.
  • Dr. Oz has come under fire recently with studies that show that only about half of the products he recommended on his show were backed by science. John Oliver tore him apart on Last Week Tonight. Twice.
  • In Leverage, the delayed version (called the "Inverted Pyramid") is the scheme of a season 4 mark. He brings a sense of scale to the whole thing: instead of a two-man operation selling stock predictions to, say, 10 or so marks, he runs a "boiler room" of grifters selling stock predictions to thousands of marks.
  • Miracle Workers: In a Season 3 episode, the gang takes a break from the Oregon Trail and stops in a village. Tightly wound Rev. Brown is approached by a snake oil salesman who promises the snake oil will help him loosen up. It does, as the reverend gets completely trashed, dressing up as a woman and singing in a bar and grabbing Prudence's breasts...only to find out the next day he was Drunk on Milk.
  • Murder Rooms. Dr Bell encounters another doctor who's offering free consultations, but the treatment is invariably an expensive patent medicine that only he sells. There's also a Running Gag of him trying to sell a magnetic device to the Navy that can deflect cannonballs...if the enemy was considerate enough to use steel shot.
  • In the Murdoch Mysteries episode "The Canadian Patient", Dr Ogden confronts a woman selling health pills who has learned enough to explain the concept of "vital amines", but not how to make pills that actually contain them, because people buy what she's selling. She ends up applying for med school and becoming Dr Ogden's new assistant.
  • Our Miss Brooks: In the episode "Vitamin E-4", Miss Brooks, Mr. Boynton and Mr. Conklin are tricked by a phony professor into helping him manufacture the eponymous "vitamin". In reality, it's a bunch of gloop whose main ingredient is chicken fat. The "professor" uses teachers to make his presentations more realitic. The head of the school board, Mr. Stone, is incredulous that normally clever people can fall for such a scam. The snake oil saleman never appears, but was voiced by Frank Nelson on the record he left in his "laboratory" to instruct his employees on how to manufacture the "vitamin".
  • The Outpost:
    • The Season 3 episode "The Hardest Part of Being Queen" sees a merchant arriving at the Outpost claiming to have a cure for the United infection. As Janzo deduces, however, it's just berry juice.
    • This same con artist returns in the Season 4 episode "Something To Live For", now pretending to be an emissary of the rampaging Masters, promising protection for villages that give him "tribute".
  • In the episode "A Single Drop of Rain" of Quantum Leap, Sam leaps into the life of a travelling "rain maker" (who is, in fact, a con man) visiting a drought-stricken farming community. Sam decides to combine his knowledge of future cloudseeding techniques with an afternoon of yelling at God that He owes Sam big time, resulting in a beneficial downpour.
  • The Rifleman: While when we meet him Speed Sullivan is more into selling lightning rods that never get delivered, he also previously sold "Speed Sullivan's All Purpose Panacea," which was little than bottles of strong liquor. This gets him into trouble because a former customer of his drank his entire order and died of alcohol poisoning, causing the man's sons to track down Speed to McCain's ranch.
  • In the taiga drama Shinsengumi, this is Hijikata Toshizou's first job.
    Kondou Isami: I'll bring you the medicine that you sell.
    Hijikata: It's okay. That doesn't work.
  • "Miss Jeanette" from True Blood does exorcisms in the woods for people who are "demon possessed". She really works in a drugstore. There's a bit of evidence she may have had legitimate abilities as an exorcist, with the dress up just being for show. This was confirmed in the episode "Frenzy". Maryann explains to Tara that "ritual is a powerful thing," and that Miss Jeanette was able to, albeit unwittingly, tap into actual supernatural forces. In fact, it was Tara's "fake" exorcism that summoned Maryann to Bon Temps in the first place.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" concerns a man who cons a town by claiming he can raise the dead. The problem is that all the graves but one in the town cemetery are populated by victims of violence (and that one died of a heart attack...after breaking her husband's arm for the sixth time), and nobody wants the dead to rise. So they pay the man not to raise the dead. He leaves town, we learn how his scheme worked... but it turns out that, without knowing it, the man did raise the dead, and they're pretty eager to get back to town.
  • They show up a couple of times on Wagon Train, such as the title character of "The Shadrack Bennington Story" (who, while something of a con man, is basically harmless) and Jethro Creech in "The Baylor Crowfoot Story" (a bullying Jerkass).
  • In Season 3 of The Wire, state senator Clay Davis solicits money from Stringer Bell to be used to "grease the wheels" for getting a federal grant. Davis just pockets the money, and the grant goes to whoever it would have gone to anyway. When Stringer finally talks to his lawyer about the whole thing, the lawyer has to laugh at it.
    Levy: [After he stops laughing] He rain made you! A guy says if you pay him, he can make it rain. You pay him. If and when it rains, he takes the credit. If it doesn't... he finds reasons for you to pay him more.

    Music 
  • "Paracetomoxyfrusebendroneomycin" by The Amateur Transplants. It can cure the common cold, and being struck by lightning! Sure, none of the animals it was tested on survived, but... details, details.
  • "Medicine Show" by Big Audio Dynamite is sung from the POV of one, extolling the virtues of his product, but never says what the product is.
  • The father of the viewpoint character in Cher's "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves" was at least a part-time snake oil salesman, selling bottles of "Doctor Good".
  • The subject of Steve Earle's "Snake Oil", though the "salesmen" he sings about are crooked politicians.
  • The Corrupt Corporate Executive of Iron Maiden's "El Dorado" says that his extortive Get-Rich-Quick Scheme "is my personal snake oil".
  • Paul McCartney plays a snake oil salesman in the "Say Say Say" music video while Michael Jackson plays his accomplice.
  • "Lily the Pink" by Scaffold (and with a young Elton John on backing vocals) is a satirical take on this; the song touts the increasingly outrageous things "Medicinal Compound" has supposedly done. "Lily the Pink's Medicinal Compound" is suspiciously close to "Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound", an actual product from the late 19th Century at least up through the Prohibition era, though its 18% alcohol content (36 proof) may have had something to do with its popularity during the latter part of that.
  • "Tarred and Feathered" by Stormwitch is about the town-to-town salesmen of the wild west era.
  • The subject of "Cosmik Debris' from Frank Zappa: The song introduces us to "the Mystery Man" who has a rather dubious line of business; he starts off by telling Zappa that he can help him reach Nirvana for a “nominal service charge” and later tries to convince him to buy an ordinary shaving kit that the Mystery Man claims will work miracles for him. Zappa isn’t fooled for a second and uses hypnotism to turn the tables on the Mystery Man and steal all his valuables.

    Puppet Shows 
  • Invoked for a quick gag in Jim Henson's adaptation of Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas , where Emmet's father is said to have been an unsuccessful snake oil salesman: "There just weren't that many people that wanted to oil a snake!"
  • In Muppet Classic Theater's adaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes, Rizzo the rat gets arrested for selling "Rizzo's Miracle Elixir" as a cure-all. He talks his way out of trouble by distracting the emperor with the "new clothes" scam.
  • Early episodes of Sesame Street has this trope in play with a trenchcoat/fedora-clad Muppet known as Lefty, who often tries to sell things to Ernie. The caveat is that he always try to make their negotiations as quiet as possible, shushing Ernie when he talks too loud, sells things that often have no practicality, like a plain O, or worse yet, an invisible ice cream cone. He mostly targets Ernie, who's one of the most gullible Muppets on Sesame Street, though he's also tried to sell things to Oscar and Herry.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In a Dragon magazine article for 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, outlining what seems to be an early draft of the 3rd Edition Bluff rules, one example is a conman selling fake healing potions, and who bluffs so well that even when a cleric exposes the scam, the mark assumes he meant well and just didn't realise.
    • This is a possible background for player characters detailed in the Player's Handbook for 5th edition, called the Charlatan.
  • In The Quacks of Quedlinburg, the players are quack doctors who make secret brews that can literally blow up on them if they get too reckless.

    Theatre 
  • Dr. Dulcamara from the opera L'elisir d'amore is a traveling purveyor of patent medicines. He arrives in the village advertising a potion capable of curing anything. Nemorino shyly asks him if he sells the elixir of love described in Adina’s book. Dulcamara claims he does, slyly proffering a bottle of simple Bordeaux.
  • Harold Hill from The Music Man is confidence man who pretends to be a traveling salesman and sells brass band instruments as a cure for non-existant social ills.
  • Ali Hakim from the musical Oklahoma!. Laurey purchases a "magic potion" (actually laudanum) from ihm, which the unscrupulous peddler guarantees will reveal her true love.
  • Eustace P. McGargle, from the 1923 musical comedy Poppy. W.C. Fields originated the character on stage and later played him in two film adaptations, the silent Sally of the Sawdust (1925) and the "talkie" Poppy (1936).
  • Adolfo Pirelli, a.k.a. Daniel Higgins in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, who sold a "Miracle Elixir" that was primarily concocted of piss and ink. Overlap with Never Trust a Hair Tonic, since his elixir claimed to make hair grow back. He becomes Sweeney's first kill after twigging to Sweeney's true identity as Benjamin Barker and attempting to blackmail him out of half his earnings.
  • Bill Starbuck from The Rainmaker and its musical adaptation 110 in the Shade. A charming confidence trickster, he arrives in a drought-ridden rural town in the West in Depression-era America and promises to bring rain in exchange for $100.

    Video Games 
  • Assassin's Creed III features these as vagrant traders, who'll advertise their magic cures as they ride around town with their wares. You can't actually buy any snake oil from them though, only generic supplies such as arrows or firearm cartridges.
  • In Cute Knight Kingdom, one story path has a pink-haired girl named Jenny who sells various "health products" and wants you to test them. If you visit her multiple times manage to collect the ingredients she wants, she'll eventually take you on as an apprentice. The title of this ending, along with the text explaining your character's reaction to it, reveal the sad truth about Jenny's "business".
  • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Thieves Guild has fallen on such hard times that their recruiter, Brynjolf, is forced to run a sideline selling miracle products such as "genuine Falmer blood elixir" to the citizens of Riften. A previous scam of his, "Wisp Essence", turned out to be crushed Nirnroot mixed with water. It doesn't help when you remember that Nirnroot can be used to make a fairly potent poison. It doesn't really matter if he actually sells anything, though: His little bouts of quackery are mainly used as a distraction so that other members of the Thieves' Guild can do their business in the market with everybody handily looking at the person who isn't breaking into their stalls.
  • The Broken Steel DLC for Fallout 3 features "The Amazing Aqua Cura" sidequest, in which you investigate a ghoul's snake oil operation. You end up being able to expose, blackmail, or force him to go legit if you uncover his secret. He is a troperiffic example of the character, putting on a show and claiming that his "Aqua Cura" will give the customer strength, happiness, better sleep, restore a ghoul's lost skin and hair, make your heart's desire fall in love with you and even clean your laundry.
  • Funnily enough, in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, a conversation between Shinon and Gatrie actually reveals the latter to have bought snake oil after being conned into thinking it was a speed potion.
  • Guild Wars 2 has one in Lion's Arch, constantly advertising his junk next to the Mystic Forge, one of the highest-traffic areas of the city.
  • Hearthstone: The Snake Oil Seller card shuffles 2 Snake Oils into your opponent's deck when it dies. The Snake Oils are spells that deal 0 damage.
  • Killing Floor's Summer Sideshow event turns the fireball-shooting Husk into a steampunk robot who acts like a Snake Oil Salesman trying to sell you fire.
  • Kingdom of Loathing does have a wagon-based healer, Doc Galactik, who uses poisonous substances in his remedies; however, his stuff is both cheap and effective. With the advent of the West of Loathing challenge path (early 2016) players can now play the Snake Oiler character class, which upgrades the character type to an effective adventurer. Snake Oilers actually do collect snakes (in a briefcase) and use their oils and venom to compound awful "cures" to give to monsters, but they also possess advanced revolver skills (as "customers" may survive), the ability to safely handle highly venomous snakes, and (as they may need to drink their own tonics) will learn to concoct genuinely effective medicine.
  • King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride has such a salesman who markets various unlikely wares, including a tonic which will make you gullible. He provides you with were beast salve in exchange for a magic statuette.
  • Mortal Kombat 1 features its iteration of Shang Tsung being played as one in the game's rebuilt timeline, barely scraping by day-to-day by selling phony cure-alls to denizens of Outworld, and being introduced getting the snot kicked out of him by an angry mob he tried to con using ordinary tea. Considering how the Shang Tsung of the timeline prior to this game was a soul-sucking sorcerer whose grand schemes resulted in the fragmentation of timelines to begin with, this is a considerable step down for the man.
  • In Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate, Dr. Goodwell is such a character. He sells various nostrums during his medicine show at Fate's Carnival, though he later delves into full Mad Scientist territory come Fate's Carnival.
  • Charlieton in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, but only when you meet him in Rogueport; when you meet him in the Pit of 100 Trials, he's an Intrepid Merchant who probably took lessons from Adam Smith. But in both cases, he's a sleazy merchant. (However, if you're very lucky when you talk to him in Rogueport, he might be selling Jammin' Jellies or Ultra Shrooms, very useful items, for only 120 coins, which is the cheapest they sell for in the game.)
    • Rip Cheato in the first game is another salesman you should be wary of. You can buy a Life Shroom from him and a few Star Pieces, but before you can buy any of his good stuff, you have to buy a lot of junk. And his prices are incredibly inflated.
    • Also, Chet Rippo. For 39 coins, he claims he will upgrade one of Mario's stats by two levels, but what he doesn't tell you is he'll downgrade the other stats one level. The Chet Rippo in the second game (not the same guy as explained by Old Man Wonky) is more honest, raising one stat while lowering another, both of your choosing.
  • Persona 5: The Wheel of Fortune Confidant, Chihaya Mifune, is a Not-So-Phony Psychic who comes to Joker's attention when she sells him a "Holy Stone" that turns out to be made of ordinary rock salt.
  • Pokémon examples:
    • The Magikarp Salesman first appears in the original Pokémon Red and Blue (and Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen). First seen in the Pokémon Center on Route 4, he offers you a Magikarp for 500 PokeDollars. This is, of course, a ripoff, because you can get a Magikarp anywhere. While he doesn't actually appear in the sequel a boy in Pewter City (which is adjacent to Route 4) will show his Gyarados to anyone who asks, and a girl in the same city claims he bought a Magikarp from a "weird old man" three years prior, and trained it.
    • In Red and Blue, however, it's only a ripoff at first glance. Magikarp IS found everywhere, but the means to catch it won't be available until after you beat Misty and reach Vermilion, which is quite a while after the salesman. Meanwhile, you get one this early, and right before a cave where you can grind it (a lot) to Level 20 to evolve...potentially before you even enter Cerulean! Watch as that 500 PokeDollar-investment suddenly becomes VERY worth it! In the remakes, however, due to changed game mechanics since the first games, Gyarados isn't as much of a Disc-One Nuke as he used to benote .
    • Zigzagged in Gold and Silver, where a Team Rocket member offers to sell you a Slowpoketail for a million PokéDollars. This is a ripoff, of course, but you couldn't buy one even if you wanted (there's a 999,999 limit to the amount of money you can carry).
    • Inverted in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, where the Meister offers to trade you his Magikarp for a Finneon. It's no better than any other Magikarp, but accepting the trade does enable the German language entry of Magikarp in your PokéDex.
    • Zigzagged in Pokémon Black and White (and its sequel), where the Magikarp Salesman appears again on the Marvelous Bridge. He offers the same deal here, but it might actually be worth it now, as Magikarp are not native to Unova, and can only be found in the Nature Reserve in the second game.
    • In X and Y, a Magikarp Salesman appears, and he's even more crooked than any others. After you talk to a hiker that you meet in the hotels enough times, he offers you a "Super Special" Magikarp in exchange for a Gyarados. It's nothing but a plain old Magikarp, and only Lvl 5, lower than one you could catch yourself. (If you knew that the guy's name was "Caveat" and that the Magikarp's name was "Carpe Diem", it might tip you off, but you only learn that if you trade it.) The only compensation is that the Magikarp has an Adamant nature (which lowers Special Attack to boost its Attack) and has a perfect IV in Attack.
    • There's a guy like this in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. He doesn't offer a Magikarp, and if you're clever, you can benefit from dealing with him. After dealing with Groudon/Kyogre, an old man who claims to sell stones appears on Route 114. He speaks highly of one he offers for 40,000 PokéDollars, even higher of one for 80,000, and highest of one for 150,000. But all three are Hard Stones. Two items he sells, which he claims are "for beginners" and tries to steer you away from, only cost 1,500; these are the Mega Evolution stones for the two Starters you did not choose.
  • Red Dead Redemption:
    • Nigel West Dickens, a major character; even mentioning the trope by name. While his products definitely don't work as advertised, they do have other beneficial effects. Drinking his medicine refills your Dead Eye meter.
    • This trope is also parodied with the "The Dangers of Doctors and Patent Medicines" short film that can be watched in the movie theater. It features a snake oil salesman and the unfortunate and violent side effects of his "remedies," ending with the warning "Medical science cannot save you. It will kill you and leave you dead.
    • Even better, in the Undead Nightmare DLC storyline, it turns out that his "vitality elixir" which he sells as a zombie repellent actually attracts the undead – John remarks that "It's like catnip to them!". This turns out to be a good thing, since you can throw bottles of the stuff to lure the zombies away, and later you even "upgrade" it by stuffing a stick of dynamite into the bottle, making it the Wild West version of Left 4 Dead's Pipe Bomb.
  • In Red Dead Redemption 2, one of the early bounties in the game is a Snake Oil Salesman wanted for murder after his wares have led to the deaths of his customers.
  • One of the stories in The Sims Medieval had the Doctor character deal with one of these. However the twist is that the bogus potion they were selling actually was having some benefits to the townsfolk. The second half of the story is the Doctor trying to figure out what exactly is in it.
  • The tutorial boss of Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher is a salesman who tries to sell you deer repellent in the middle of New York. Refusing his offer turns out to be a bad idea, as Socrates has an accident with a deer later.
  • Mystia Lorelei of the Touhou Project series. As revealed in Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red, she's started a business of selling grilled lamprey, which is rumored to cure night-blindness. Business is booming since her area has an inexplicably high amount of people suffering from night-blindness, and when people eat the food she serves, they find themselves miraculously cured! Of course, the fact that Mystia has the ability to induce night-blindness on others and can cancel it at anytime she wants may have something to do with it as well.
  • Available as a character class in the Spin-Off West of Loathing. The snake oiler actually collects snakes, and can extract a certain amount of both their oil (a minor healing item) and their venom (poison grenades) per day. The amount can be increased by stuffing defeated snakes into their breifcase. The description for their healing skill is "Some of your patent medicines actually work! You put them aside for yourself."
  • Griftah in World of Warcraft sells trinkets and amulets that he swears offer all sorts of amazing benefits, like recovering health by eating, finding treasure in mundane places, and coming back to life. Every good luck charm he sells offers access to basic MMO mechanics, aside from a tikbalang ward (they might get you if you don't have one... or not) and soap on a rope (running around all day in the same clothes...).
  • Early in The Yukon Trail you can talk to a guy who will sell you gophers who can detect gold and bicycles designed for travelling through the mountains (this game taking place seventy years before the invention of mountain bikes). Neither of them work.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • JonTron set up a stereotypical Snake Oil Salesman wagon outside of a Goopnote  store, dressed up accordingly, and played the part of one "Doctor Jonathan Tronley" hawking his wares.
    Tronley: Our competitior, wherever they happen to be located... exactly... geographically... at this moment in time... by coincidence... believes you should have to pay premium prices for snake oil! Not so here at Doctor Jonathan Tronley's Medicinal Menagerie. They would charge you $240 for a simple hairbrush! Here? Not more than a nickel for our finest Cobra Comb-a. $90 for some vitamins containing God-knows-what?! Even you're not that stupid! Here? All the vitamins you could need right... [taps bottle with cane] ...in that snake oil. One ingredient: crushed snakes. Gotta be vitamins in there somewhere!
  • Skrufy the Hobo from Norman Tweeter qualifies, as he once sold a copy of Manos: The Hands of Fate for $75. [1]
  • On Cinema: Dr. San whom Tim often pays for alternative medicine treatments which often led to Tim developing more health issues. Greg, however, does not trust him and has on at least one occasion referred to his treatments as "quackery".
  • Fat, French and Fabulous discusses the early 20th century radium craze more broadly, but also mentions William J. A. Bailey, a Harvard dropout who claimed to be a doctor and got rich selling quack radiation therapies, including the radioendocrinator, a dangerous radiation source worn directly against the body (specifically the abdomen or the scrotum) and supposedly treated the endocrine system. Bailey himself was a passionate user of the radioendocrinator and eventually died of bladder cancer.

    Western Animation 
  • The aptly named Flim Flam from The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo.
    • Though, to be fair, his "Lotsa Luck Joy Juice" does work as a cure for lycanthropy, making him a tidy profit in the pilot episode.
  • The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin: Tweeg once cheated people out of their money by selling them fake medicine. The heroes tricked him into buying it back by making him believe there's a machine that turns the fake medicine into precious stones.
  • In one episode of Amphibia normally scrupulously honest Hop Pop briefly becomes one when he's desperate to raise money to save the family vegetable stand, proclaiming that a pretty mundane mix of vegetable juice is actually a cure-all. When he gets particularly desperate, he starts making the stuff out of actual garbage. His conscience eventually gets the better of him and he calls the scam off.
  • In the Ben 10: Omniverse episode, Professor Blarney T. Hokestar sells a "miracle elixir" that grows plant-like hair on the user's head. The elixir only works for a limited time though, as the alien it was demonstrated on (who just so happens to be the Prof's underling) is shown to be bald again a short time later.
  • Betty Boop, Koko, and Bimbo in Betty Boop, M.D. sell bottles of "Jippo" (we see the bottles getting filled from a fire hydrant).
  • In the Felix the Cat TV cartoon "Youth Water", the Professor poses as a salesman, using ordinary bottled water to con gullible old people out of their money by making them think its water from a Fountain of Youth.
  • An episode of Fievel's American Tails features Dr. Travis T. Hippocrates, who commissions an unknowing Fievel to pass out candy to everyone in town that gives them hiccups so that the doctor can sell them a placebo cure.
  • Futurama: Whoever made and sold to Dr. Zoidberg "Dr. Flimflam's Miracle Cream" probably qualifies, though they're never seen. Though the cream really did give Fry and Leela superpowers...
  • In Hoppity Hooper, Waldo P. Wigglesworth hawks patent medicines of dubious effectiveness.
  • In Jackie Chan Adventures, Uncle's Identical Grandfather sells bottles of "Chun Gai Surprise" in The Wild West. Near the end of the episode he uses its contents to melt down a rifle.
    Uncle: Chun Gai Surprise: good for digestion, bad for everything else.
  • In The Legend of Korra, Bolin is sent with bribe money to change the outcome of a Kangaroo Court. The people he ends up bribing have nothing to do with the trial, but gleefully take his money anyways.
  • Looney Tunes:
    • In one cartoon, after weakling Daffy Duck is humiliated at the beach by a bully, a huckster sells him a bottle of muscle tonic (ingredients: 10% tap water, 90% hot mustard); then, to prove it worked, the guy makes a fake 5,000 lb barbell out of balloons while Daffy is coughing from the spicy drink, and when he recovers, tells him to lift it, which he does with ease. (Of course, this leads to Daffy only humiliating himself more, but he gets even in the end, daring the bully to lift the barbell; the guy does so only too well, propelling himself way into the air and crashing to the ground.)
    • Averted in "Porky the Rainmaker", where a salesman is selling Weather Manipulation pills, and they geniunely work.
  • An American cold war propaganda piece called Make Mine Freedom had a sleazy man selling "Ism" tonic, as a cure to the ills of government. A savvy would-be customer shows the side effects of it as being horrible (slave farms, no free speech, everyone is poor and under the heel of the state). The townsfolk run the con man out of town by throwing his "medicine" at him.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has a rather odd case with Flim and Flam, a pair of unicorn brothers who appear in the season 2 episode The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000. Travelling across Equestria with an automated cider press, they put up a big catchy musical number about how they can produce gallons of great-tasting cider in no time at all... but the thing is? They're actually being honest about it, proving to make cider just as good as locals The Apple Family, and far quicker and greater quantities than the Apples can. However, they act more like Snake Oil Salesponies by first demanding an absurd amount of the profits in exchange for using their machine to help the Apples produce cider quicker, and then set up a competition to try and run the Apples out of business so they can use up all of the farm's apples for cider, sell it all, and then take off with the profits. They fit this trope much better when they return in season 4's Leap of Faith, where they're actually running a Medicine Show hawking their latest creation of a miracle cure-all tonic.
  • The Owl House:
    • Eda is both a figurative and literal example of the trope, selling human trash as expensive collectables and elixirs of dubious quality, including literal snake oil ("no one wants an un-oiled snake!").
    • In the episode "Keeping Up A-fear-ances", Eda's mother, Gwendolyn, falls for a scam that promises a cure for Eda's curse in exchange for her life's savings and priceless family heirlooms. Luz quickly recognizes it as a complete sham, but Gwendolyn is so taken in that it's only when she sees the wizard who sold her the "cure" is three unscrupulous gremlins making the "cures" out of literal garbage to admit she'd been strung along.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Abe showed Homer the merits of his homemade love tonic. It's so successful that they take it on the road in an old west charlatan style show. At one point, Dr. Hibbert mentions that the tonic's effects are actually due to intoxication caused by the filthy bathtub it is made in, before drinking some himself.
    • Lyle Lanley, the monorail salesman. He made his living tricking towns with a budget surplus into buying shoddy monorails then skipping town.
    • Played with in the episode where Ned opens a Christian theme park in his late wife Maude's memory. The park is a bust until someone has a vision of Heaven in front of the statue of Maude near the gates. Everyone thinks it's a miracle until Ned later finds out there's a gas leak in front of the statue and people are just hallucinating off the fumes. However, the park is bringing people together—and raking in loads of money—as crowds flock to the statue to experience their version of Heaven, so Ned uncomfortably goes along with it. He finally caves in when he sees two children try to light a candle near the statue...
    • Selma once visited a Gypsy fortune teller hoping to buy some love potion so she can find a husband. The fortune teller accidentally drinks her surprisingly effective "truth serum" revealing to Selma that the bogus love potion is mostly made of just "corn syrup and rubbing alcohol" as well as there being a big chance it will cause hair loss.
    • Homer invested some money in a scam that told him which football team would win. Of course, he lost money to it, but the worst part was he borrowed money from Fat Tony.
  • Dr. Charlatan, whom The Smurfs dealt with in "The Miracle Smurfer".
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "There Will Be Grease" when a deposit of grease is discovered under Krusty Krab and Chum Bucket after years of runoff. Mr. Krabs and Plankton become business partners selling grease as an all-purpose miracle juice. It actually is fairly effective at the things they claim, but it has a mess of unfortunate side effects.
    • In "Chocolate With Nuts", Spongebob and Patrick become door to door chocolate bar salesmen. After a string of bad luck, they finally start getting sales by stretching the truth with outrageous lies about their candy bars such as, "Rub it on your skin and you'll live forever", "It'll make your hair grow" etc. They seem to recieve no negative consequences for their lies.
  • Harry Mudd shows up in an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series hawking a Love Potion. It turns out to be the real thing... except that it's short-lived, and when it starts to wear off it makes the affected people hate each other until it wears off completely. Mudd admits that he didn't know that the stuff actually worked and is chagrined at how cheaply he was trying to sell it.
  • An episode of Thunder Cats 2011 features one of these, from whom Lion-O purchases some of his "miracle elixir". Even though it has... unpredictable effects on whoever drinks it, the thing proves really good to ward off demon-dinosaur Mumm-Ra.
  • One of Granny May's many crimes in WordGirl. She sells it by cocooning Mr. Botsford in easily-breakable yarn (as opposed to her usual Nigh-Invulnerable yarn), and using the fact he can break free as proof of her claims about it, but is revealed when WordGirl switches it with some of her normal yarn during a demonstration.

     Real Life 
  • Selling "predictions" on outcomes is a common scam with sports betting, especially the NFL. First, a scam artist acquires a few hundred thousand potential pigeons. He then sends predictions to them and keeps sending predictions only to those who have received a lucky streak of predictions. So why use the NFL? Well, first, the season is extremely short: 17 games over just over four months, plus a three- or four-game postseason over one month.note  Starting at mid-to-late season, a scammer might only have to make seven straight predictions before he's "gotten them all right", and is offering his pigeons Super Bowl picks. This leaves more potential marks in the pot. Second, betting on football in the United States is far more common and culturally accepted. Even when illegal, it's treated more like "boys will be boys" than as a crime.
  • A number of consumer products that started as patent medicine still exist today, albeit with revised ingredients and in compliance with applicable laws. Some of these include Bayer Aspirin, Geritol, Goody's Powder, Smith Brothers cough drops and Vicks VapoRub.
  • Some carbonated beverages used to be sold as patent medicine but have since be repurposed and are no longer considered medicinal. Examples include 7Up, Dr Pepper, Moxie, Hires Root Beer, Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
  • Radiation, particularly radium, radon, and uranium, was once considered a miracle designer drug in the early-mid 20th century (known now as "radioactive quackery"), able to cure any number of aliments, rejuvenate your body, and even slow aging! Indeed, it was a high demand item, bought in large quantities and at very high prices. Of course, it's now widely known consuming radioactive water and covering yourself in radioactive substances didn't cure anything, unless the thing you wanted "cured" was not being subjected to a Cruel and Unusual Death and be buried in a lead-lined coffin.
  • The infamous HeadOn commercials that simply repeated "HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead" three times with no explanation. This was mandated because the earlier commercials that claimed it was a cure for headaches were impossible to verify, so the producers were not allowed to actually say it does anything (because it doesn't). Notably, the three "active" ingredients in the product, iris versicolor (a flower), white bryony (a berry), and potassium dichromate (a disinfectant), are all dangerously toxic to humans, but the concentrations in HeadOn are about one part per million, which is effectively nothing, meaning HeadOn is basically just a stick of wax, so rubbing a candle on your forehead would have the same effect.
  • Such concentrations are part of what is known as homeopathy, a pseudoscientific form of alternative medicine based on the (supposed) principle of "like cures like", i.e. the belief that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people. Homeopathic "remedies" come in the form of said substances diluted in a concentration so high that there's basically none of the substance left remaining in the solution, i.e. if one were to make a homeopathic concentration of battery acid in water, it'll end up with just water and almost none, if any, battery acid left. This was bluntly ridiculed by a skeptic who questioned the efficacy of homeopathic treatments by diluting a small amount of toilet cleaning bleach in distilled water until there's none of the toxic stuff left, as well as public "overdoses" where protesters intentionally ingest loads of homeopathic remedies in front of pharmacies selling homeopathic cures alongside conventional medicines to prove their point that they're just glorified sugar pills or vials of distilled water. Unfortunately though, while the practice has been heavily regulated in some countries,note  and there have been calls for homeopathy to be banned such as in Russianote  and in Spain, such practices still have quite a following in places such as India, where it is institutionalised to the point that the Indian government established the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy (AYUSH) in 2014.
  • Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the biotech company Theranos, is one of the more infamous modern-day examples. Initially hyped as having made a miraculous breakthrough in blood testing that would have drastically reduced its price and the amount of blood necessary to perform it (only a finger prick's worth) without cost to accuracy, Theranos reached a valuation of over $10 billion in 2013-14 even though their technology did not work, largely because Holmes was very charismatic, did a very good Steve Jobs impression, and made a lot of connections with rich and powerful people. A 2015 investigation by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou and a pair of actual scientists, John Ioannidis and Eleftherios Diamandis, exposed Theranos' fraud, setting off a chain of Disaster Dominoes for the company that ended with it shutting down in 2018 and Holmes getting sentenced to 11 1⁄4 years in prison and a fine of $452 million for fraud. The docudrama series The Dropout is based on the affair.



Alternative Title(s): The Quack

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