What Happened
The "make money online" course industry has reached industrial scale, with market estimates at approximately $370 billion globally as of 2026. This includes everything from legitimate skill-building courses to outright fraudulent grift. The fraudulent portion operates on a simple model: someone with minimal actual expertise in a field creates a course teaching that field, prices it between $97 and $997, and then implements a refund policy specifically designed to make refunds nearly impossible. Buyers take the course, find it worthless, and attempt to get refunds only to discover that refunds require proving they "didn't apply the teachings," a subjective standard designed to be impossible to satisfy.
The business model is mathematically elegant. You spend $5,000 to $50,000 creating a course (usually by rehashing publicly available information or content stolen from legitimate sources). You sell 10,000 copies at $297 each. Your revenue is $2.97 million. Your refund rate is usually 10-15% because the refund policy is designed to be complicated and discouraging. Even at 15% refunds, you keep $2.5 million from an investment of $25,000. The course doesn't need to actually teach anything valuable. It needs to look professional enough that people buy it and then feel too embarrassed to aggressively pursue refunds.
The industry has professionalized this. "Course launch coaches" teach other grifters how to do this. "Email list builders" sell courses on how to build email lists (using fake testimonials and exaggerated claims). The entire ecosystem is grifters selling courses to aspiring grifters about how to sell courses to people hoping to get rich. The value created is real money flowing from people who want to improve themselves to people who want to monetize that aspiration without providing actual value.
Why This Matters
This industry succeeds because it exploits legitimate human desires for self-improvement and financial independence. The underlying demand is real. People do want to learn new skills. They do want to earn more money. The fraudulent course industry exists in the space between demand and legitimate supply, offering the appearance of a solution without the substance. The buyer is not stupid; they're hopeful. The fraudster is not providing a service; they're monetizing hope.
At $370 billion, this isn't a niche industry anymore. This is a major economic force. That money is flowing primarily to people who have no expertise in what they're teaching. It's flowing away from legitimate educators, business schools, and skill-building programs. People who would benefit from genuine education are instead losing money to fraudsters who are better at marketing than teaching.
The Refund Policy Loophole
The most insidious part of the fake course industry is the refund policy. Almost all courses offer a money-back guarantee: "30 days to try the course. Full refund if you don't like it." But the fine print says refunds are only available if you can prove you "actively engaged" with the material and it "didn't work for you." This is circular logic designed to be impossible to satisfy. How do you prove a course didn't work? The course creator will simply say "you didn't follow the instructions correctly" or "you didn't apply it properly." Suddenly your request for a refund becomes a question of your competence, not the course's quality. Most people accept this rather than argue.
The refund policy is the core of the business model. Without it, people would demand refunds constantly because the courses are mostly worthless. With it, refunds become optional based on the creator's interpretation of whether you tried hard enough. This transfers the risk to the buyer: you pay for a course that might be useless, and then you have the burden of proving it was useless against someone who has financial incentive to deny it. The system is rigged to generate revenue from people hoping to improve themselves.
Sources
FTC: "Warning: Fake Online Courses and Refund Scams"
Consumer Reports: "Online Course Fraud Analysis"
Better Business Bureau: "Online Education Industry Concerns"