Trump’s Doomed Video Phones Loom in Backdrop of His New Media Launch
- Fraud case centers on the billionaire’s endorsement of device
- Former president, three of his children to be deposed by June
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Years before he announced plans for a social media and entertainment empire, Donald Trump was promoting another big idea in mass communication.
It was pitched as revolutionary: a desktop video phone that would modernize phone calls from the C-suite to the kitchen counter. Starting around 2008, the future U.S. president endorsed the device, sold by a multilevel marketing firm called ACN Opportunity LLC, with claims that people could make easy money peddling it “without any of the risks most entrepreneurs have to take.”