Teach Me To Trade -- the company behind those annoying infomercials full of false promises and exaggerated claims -- has attracted the scorn of the Securities & Exchange Commission, which has filed civil fraud charges against Linda Woolf and David Gengler.

The SEC charges that "In order to con victims into paying as much as $40,000 for TMTT products and services, the Commission alleges that Woolf and Gengler lied about their success with the trading system, when in truth neither Woolf nor Gengler ever purchased TMTT's products or became successful traders."

SEC Chairman Chris Cox chastised the promoters for preying on the "elderly, the desperate, and even the unemployed by promising financial security while instead robbing victims blind."

The Commission alleges that, while the promoters portrayed themselves as successful traders, neither of them had ever reported a profit from trading on their tax returns.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia has also filed an indictment against the promoters.

Here's where it gets really interesting. The Teach Me To Trade "system" is part of the the Whitney Information Network (OTC: RUSS), which is dealing with an SEC investigation of its own. That company's namesake and former CEO? Russ Whitney, whose rap sheet includes armed robbery.

It's been said before but it's worth saying again; Late-night infomercials are not the place to find the secrets to tremendous wealth, and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

According to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, having a bestselling book can be as easy as paying a marketing firm $10,000 to $15,000. Because the rankings are updated hourly, a promotional blitz, such as a mass email offering "downloadable bonuses" supposedly valued at thousands of dollars -- such as recordings of motivational speeches and contact information for important people -- can garner enough sales in a short time period to send the book high in the rankings.

And because thousands of people check the rankings, a presence there can lead to more book sales. On his website, John T. Reed writes about supposed tactics used by real estate guru Russ Whitney (whose company, Whitney Information Network, is under SEC investigation) for getting his book on Amazon.com, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMZN) charts:

On 4/26/03 I got an email from a person who said they were an employee of Russ Whitney. They further said that on 4/18/03, Russ had all his employees go on Amazon.com and buy two copies of his book between 1PM and 2PM. The employees then turned their Amazon "print this for your records" receipt into accounting and got reimbursed for the full amount. Some were reportedly urged to buy five copies.

In addition to ordering his employees to buy the book between 1 and 2 PM EST on 4/18/03, Whitney also urged his customers to buy it from Amazon.com during the same one-hour time period offering them "11 FREE Special Reports (valued at $29 each, a total of $319)."Whitney stated openly that the purpose of this was to "...drive Millionaire Real Estate Mentor to the top of the Amazon.com Best Seller List."

Any system which reports bestsellers on an hourly basis is likely to be prone to a certain amount of manipulation. The question is, does it matter enough for it to be worthwhile for Amazon to crack down on? I doubt it.