Getting to the meat of 'Forever' stocks...or not.

After doing a Google search to find out which stocks are good to buy and hold, I came across this scammy type site.  The page loads and the video starts playing once it's buffered.  The premise is that if you listen for just a few minutes, the guy will tell you the list of the 10 "Forever" stocks that you should get a hold of.  He never actually names any of them though...

I couldn't wait to see if he was going to actually say the stock names, so I tried fast forwarding through it...but the controls were disabled.  Talk about cheap tricks...

Time to bypass those controls:

• In Google Chrome, I popped open the element inspector and found the player element by right clicking close to the video and choosing "Inspect Element."  If you right click on the video, it shows the flash context menu which doesn't have that option.

• I dug deeper into the html structure to find the flash player object.  The inspector steered me in the right direction with the light blue background and object element tag displayed on the page when you hover over an element in the inspector.

• After finding the object I expanded it to see what was going on.

• I noticed that the object contained a parameter named flashvars which itself had a parameter named "controlbar.position" which was set to "none."  I figured we didn't need this so I deleted it.

• I then noticed another object called "wmode" set to "opaque."  I assumed this is what was hiding the borders of the player, so deleted this as well.

• After deleting the wmode parameter, the borders of the player displayed along with the slider control at the bottom.  I was then able to see what a huge scam the page was -- the video was 51 minutes and 59 seconds long.  I sure hope no one actually got suckered into listening to this drivel for so long...

• I skipped through the video to see if any parts mentioned any of the stock names.  Sure enough it doesn't.  And once you get past a certain point in the video, a "Join Me Now" button appears leading to this site.

After all is told, this is a pure scam and I hope whoever reads this will be able to save some time if you ever encounter something like this in the future.  At first it might take some trial and error to figure out which parts to edit/delete, but it shouldn't be too bad.  If you encounter anything different, or have anything to add to this (such as parameters to look out for), please add a comment!