«The system lies to you, we all have proof of it. But There are people who are generating their own wealth, designing their futurewithout wasting time on obsolete training. We are making history, creating from scratch the change that others deny us in the largest market of opportunities in the history of Humanityand forming the freest and most united community in the world. My name is Roberto Gamboa and I want to welcome you to our reality. To the parallel reality of the ‘digital trafficker’.
Thus, halfway between marketing and self-help, with an evident messianic touch, a microphone Madonna hanging from the ear and a certain aroma of The Matrixwas presented a few years ago on the internet Roberto Gamboa as the new guru of digital traffic: the technique that was going to govern advertising on the Internet, and therefore one of the professions “of the future”, and which simply consisted – despite the dense newspeak – of charging for placing digital advertising to favor analogue businesses.
Con reels of Yankee inspiration, “Televangelist” motivational slogans and always surrounded by loyal enthusiasts of his marketing cult, Gamboa first sold an image of a winner, and then some online courses that promised to turn into toss of the sale in that digital Eldorado to anyone who simply watched his videos and tried “hard enough” to get rich.
The music was familiar, but it did not disappoint. Several economic newspapers echoed how his figure as the wise man of wealth was going to grow due, also, to incessant advertising on Google, his shows as a rock star proliferated and there was no shortage of forums in which he was praised as only the internet epic knows how to do – with Steve Jobs y Bill Gates on the horizon.
The problem: the Online Traffic Expert Master that Gamboa sold as the panacea It was not approved by any institution -more than the usual university of life-, and they quickly began to proliferate criticism of their courses, for being “completely empty”and their practices as “abusive”, for supposedly taking advantage of the anxiety of some unwary people to reap huge benefits.
THE WORLD has now had access to the first conviction of Roberto Gamboawho in reality has, as has been published, nothing more than a FP in Computer Science and powerful eloquence. Gamboa has been sentenced by the Court of First Instance 52 of Madrid to return 4,840 euros to JP, for abusing him in hiring the “master’s degree.”
The man, a 48-year-old Post Office worker, simply booked the course in 2020 “after seeing the offer from the Semana Trafficker on my mobile,” he explained to this newspaper. “I watched three videos and then they did the interview in which they supposedly screened the best candidates for the course… But in reality they all entered, of course.” Just to be able to access the interview, with no guarantee of being able to do the “master’s degree”, he had to pay 121 euros. “In the end they caught me, of course, and that same day I paid the 4,840 euros for the course.”
A month later, as they were “unblocking” content, «I realized that it was smoke, a deception, they didn’t teach you anything. The first lesson, for example, was to make a profile on Facebook Ads, which is something that anyone can do without training. The man finished the course already asking for the money back, “but they told me that I had not tried hard enough and they offered me an individualized session… What did it matter, just like the interview, was a former student, because this is a pyramid topic».
In the end, the “Institute” placed J.’s success on his own shoulders: if he did not succeed it was because he did not try hard enough, they told him.
He asked for the money back, Roberto Gamboa SL denied it and hence this conviction… In which the plaintiff has been represented by the lawyer Alejandra Rodriguezfrom the office, curiously, of the greatest Spanish specialist in sects and coercive cults, the lawyer Carlos Bardavío: «As far as we know, this is the first case in which a smoke peddler has been convicted for making people believe in success in an infallible way. This sentence opens the doors to other possible victims of companies that sell smoke at a price of gold», says Bardavío. Marketing specialists point out to EL MUNDO that there are courses that teach the same basic skills for a price ten times lower.
Gamboa’s lawyers, contacted by this newspaper, did not want to comment.
The website of the Online Traffic Institute, which at the time it once housed a Department of Happiness and Success According to what has been published, it remained down yesterday.